Elijah Wheat Showroom is delighted to present “Tender Temper”, a solo exhibition of ceramic sculptures by Ashley Lyon. Inhabiting a Kunsthalle-like space on the Hudson River, Lyon’s show celebrates a lusciousness of flesh and intimacy, visualized through the ever-changing maternal body. These are works in a complicated relationship with sentimentality; enlarged domestic objects and cropped body sections reference support and transformation, while swollen breasts - presented as a bench - an enlarged leg - become a tree trunk- and ropes propped in an unspecified readiness elude easy meaning. A mashup of sex, body, and baby, the naked weight and labor of young motherhood’s emotional and physical intensity is laid bare.

Lyon’s newest work seeks to mine the incredibly rich and complex territory of the changes - to the physical and physiological body - inherent in the process of becoming a mother. She considers the “simultaneity of the mother's experience, at once breathtaking, beautiful, confusing, and grueling.” These are words and pieces which embody Alexandra Sacks’ term “matrescense”, the birth of a mother, the profound transition comparable to that experienced in the time of adolescence; at once the body and the mind are assailed by contradictory emotions, ambivalent perspectives. Motherhood, these pieces remind us, rarely matches up to expectations, whether those expectations are internalized or exposed from without, by society and all its norms. To wit: a sculpted hand holds - catches - a layer cake in the moment of its collapse. Sparked by the folly of a child’s first birthday party, this piece at the entrance of the gallery sets the scene for the deeply personal and yet sharply universal explorations which fill the space with this artist’s unstoppable ambition.

Shaping these ceramic works are an obsession with prescription and an intricately constructed theory of the real. We are met with detailed replicas of objects traditionally soft in nature and possessed of intense tactile and nostalgic energies. Lyon’s sculptures are at once atemporal representations of everyday items and uncanny beings which seize at lived reality through a storytelling of the textured and the idiosyncratic. Between 2015 and 2017, the artist’s investigations probed the complexity of the emotional security on offer in the home, particularly through the histories layered in objects of comfort. Since becoming a mother in 2018, Lyon has pursued a powerful new direction in her work; a return, in sculpture, to the primacy of the human figure, but with a child - and a new self - as the muse.

And at the heart of it all is clay; its physicality, its evocative depths. Through her care and closeness for her material, Lyon makes it possible for the viewer’s experience to oscillate between the metaphorical and the material, the suggested and the specific. These are pieces which ask questions of the realities we construct for ourselves, which examine the relationship between empathic response, haptic perception, and psychological projection.

Ashley Lyon (b.1983, Palm Springs, CA) lives and works in Newburgh, NY. She received a BFA in Ceramics from the University of Washington and an MFA in Sculpture + Extended Media from the Virginia Commonwealth University. Lyon has been awarded residencies at the Archie Bray Foundation, Anderson Ranch Arts Center, the European Ceramic WorkCentre and Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts. She received Elizabeth Greenshields Grants in 2011 and 2014. Her work has been exhibited at Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, Omaha, NE; Hunter College, New York, NY; SUNY Cortland, Cortland, NY; The Sculpture Center, Cleveland, OH; Alfred Ceramic Art Museum, Alfred, NY and Jane Lombard Gallery, New York, NY.