Thinking Through Mud: Ceramics Exhibition
Lake Oswego Arts Council celebrates ceramics featuring work by Oregon artists. Exhibition runs through April 10 at Artspace Gallery.
The Arts Council of Lake Oswego is presenting "Thinking Through Mud: Arrangements of Clay + Ikebana," a ceramics exhibition running through April 10, 2026 at the Artspace Gallery in downtown Lake Oswego. The exhibition showcases the work of eight artists: James Alby, Lisa Conway, Marjorie Dial, Nick Norman, Ben Killen Rosenberg, Ben Skiba, ahuva s. zaslavsky, and student artist Renka Ikeban.
The exhibition celebrates ceramics as an art form that emphasizes process, care, and curiosity over technical perfection. According to the Arts Council, ceramics represent an exercise in relinquishing control, with unpredictability being intrinsic to firing processes. The featured works demonstrate how clay, as a democratic and abundant material, possesses extraordinary potential for meaning and transformation.
The pieces in this exhibition evoke themes of earth, layered streets, and the residue of life. Each work consciously violates conventions of function and craft, presented in the artists' authentic and personal ways. Rather than simply challenging preconceptions, these sculptures serve as survivors of artistic and technical processes—cerebral yet spiritual, provocative yet generous, and irreverent yet earnest.
This is a curated exhibition, not an open call for submissions. The work has been selected by the Arts Council to celebrate contemporary ceramic practice and the intersection of clay work with ikebana (Japanese floral arrangement) principles.