Elyse Pignolet
Born in Oakland, CA, Elyse Pignolet is an American with Filipino heritage, living and working in Los Angeles. She attended California State University, San Francisco, studying Fine Arts. She continued her studies at California State University, Long Beach, on a CSU exchange program. In 2001 she lived in Madrid and Barcelona, Spain, studying arts and Spanish language. She completed her BFA degree at CSU Long Beach in 2007. Her studies included an intensive ceramics tour through Mainland China in 2007, and she also attended the International Ceramics Biennale in Korea, in 2007. She was awarded a CSU Long Beach Travel Scholarship for Art, and will travel in the fall of 2008 to Portugal to study traditional Portuguese tiles. She has traveled extensively in Europe, Asia, Australia, Africa, and South America.
Pignolet works primarily in ceramics and her work has been inspired by and dealt with various themes including social issues and topics from contemporary news articles, as well as urban themes. Her works attempt to place the permanence and traditions of ceramics with the fleeting and transitory nature of the contemporary world. She has created several bodies of work that place the extensive history of ceramics in contrast with the temporary nature of graffiti as a starting point to make hand-built sculptures that draw from the traditional calligraphies of various cultures and the characters, combined with the lettering of contemporary urban writing. Other artistic projects of hers, including her drawings continue to reference the world around us, dealing with formal concerns of art while blurring the line between figuration and abstraction. Her drawings begin with the deconstruction of city grids, maps, architectural plans, which are reorganized in multilayered semi-abstract compositions. Other ceramic projects have juxtaposed the brash nature of political news headlines with the subtle shapes of traditional ceramic forms. Her works have been featured in several contemporary arts publications including the La Weekly, Juxtapoz Magazine, and the Los Angeles Times.