From Wind and Water to Pâtisserie:
The Evolution of Shayna Leib’s Sculpture
Like quilts fashioned from various colors and textures of coral reef, Shayna Leib’s Wind and Water sculptures reflect the two major passions in her life – music and the ocean. Trained as a classical pianist, the artist relies upon the same part-to-whole nature of music that brings together individual notes and melodic lines in the creation of a greater composition. Growing up on the Central Coast of California, Leib became a diver and underwater photographer, further informing the direction of her art.
In a recent American Craftarticle, Fear & Fascination, Judy Arginteanu wrote:“A large wall sculpture (about 4.5 by 2 feet) might contain some 40,000 individual pieces of hand-pulled, custom-colored cane, which Leib then slumps, cuts, and meticulously arranges in intricate patterns, like those nature seems to create so effortlessly.”
Leib studied Russian literature, glassblowing, and classical piano while completing her Bachelors of Art degree in Philosophy at California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo, California. Accepted into a PhD philosophy program in New York, she chose instead to pursue glass and metal at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and graduated with her MFA in 2003. Working as a metal fabricator and forger at Pearson Design Studios in Maine, Leib reproduced the famous designs by the late Ronald Hayes Pearson for his wife, Carolyn Pearson. Upon her return to California in 2004, she taught sculpture and drawing at Cal Poly until her move in 2005 to teach glass at the UM-Wisconsin.
Currently Leib works in a variety of mediums including metal, ceramic and photography, though glass remains her focus. She prefers to use the molten material not for its mimetic qualities, but for its ability to express flow, freeze a moment in time, and manipulate optics. She states: “The things I find beautiful have always been fractal in nature. I am intrigued by multitudes of tiny little parts – blades of grass all bending in the wind to the same rhythm. As you pan out you have waves of form. Zoom in, and you see each individual blade of grass moving to the flow of the wind.”
Leib’s work, found in numerous private and public collections nationally, has been exhibited at SOFA Chicago and New York for the last decade. She is represented by Habatat Galleries Florida in West Palm Beach, showcased in museums, worldwide blogs, and magazines, and featured on the pages of Contemporary Lampworking, The Best of American Glass Artists Volume L-Z, and A História Do Vidro(A History of Glass).Leibwas recognized as a 2010 Wisconsin Arts Board Grant Recipient, nominated in 2011 for the Louis Comfort Tiffany Award, and in2015 listed as one of the 30 Most Amazing Glass Artists Alive.
For the last year Leib has been creating work for her new series, Pâtisserie, atherapeutic exercise in re-training her mind to look at dessert as form rather than food. To glass, the artist combined porcelain and nearly every possible technique in both mediums to include glassblowing, hot-sculpting, lampwork, fusing, casting, and grinding in glass and well as the ceramic techniques of hand-building, throwing, and using a good old fashioned pastry tube.