Leonie Lacouette's studio sits amid wooded, soft rolling hills in rural Ulster County, New York.
Lacouettes was born (in 1960) and raised in Manhattan, the daughter of an artist and an actress. Her parents encouragement led Lacouette to the High School of Art & Design, then to SUNY New Paltz, where she earned her Bachelor of Fine Arts in ceramics in 1983. The college was situated near the family's weekend farmhouse in Wallkill, and she convinced them to move there permanently.
Yet the city's congestion, the artsy industrial chic of SoHo and the electric pace of city life all made their way into Lacouette's early work.
Many of the clocks were crowded with life - found objects, charts and diagrams from encyclopedias, miniture reproductions of common items like toasters or classic busts or violins - and often topped with a pediment of corrugated steel or other scrap metal. Somewhere too, there usually appeared a checkerboard pattern, which Lacouette views as a kind of "graphic yin and yang." This early work was enormously successful, appearing in the pages of Home magazine, the New York Times, The Crafts Report and the Hundson Valley magazine.
Lacouette still likes putting together these narrative and free-associative pieces because she finds "a playfulness there." Though Lacouette will probably never be accused of being a minimalist, she finds herself "moving toward a more basic geometry." Indeed, more recent clocks are little more than the construction and combination of various shapes (squares, circles, rectangles, triangles) made primarily out of sheet copper and various metal leafs, which she says, possess an inherent warmth. "It's a practical concern, but also a lifestyle concern."
Though materials and forms may vary, the feeling of assemblage - of different elements pieced together, applied and layered - is ever-present. As Lacouette explains, "When you're an art student, you long to do something different. Now I want to do something beautiful. The idea that the work has a warmer look in good."
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