Ivia Yavelow
Utopian, 2025
Woodfired clay with porcelain inlay and wood ash
3 1/2" x 4"
Brushed, 2025
Clay glazed with black underglaze and black copper oxide, reduction fired to cone 10
7" x 5"
Ivia Sky Yavelow's process and concept based multi-media works include installation, sculpture, and work on paper made with graphite, ceramic, and ash. The qualities of these materials inform her work. Graphite is slippery, impermanent, common, and transferrable. Ash builds up in woodfire ceramic kilns from the wood used to fuel them, leaving crumbling and rough trace residue that ends up only a small amount of the mass used to fire the kiln. Woodfire kilns especially require community and communication to feed them wood fuel 24/7. Ceramic is mutable and recyclable, transforming from soft and impressionable to solid and fragile.
Yavelow has exhibited in the tri-state area since 2010 at venues including Ellarslie Museum, Philadelphia Fringe Festival, ArtWorks Trenton, New Hope Arts, and more. Her work has won awards from institutions including the New York Studio School in New York City, NY and the Ellarslie Museum in Trenton, NJ. She earned a BA from Bard College in 2014 and studied at the New York Studio School. In 2015 she was awarded a visual artist fellowship from the Edward F. Albee Foundation and completed a residency at their William Flanagan Memorial Creative Persons Center in Montauk, NY.
Her recent work uses orchestrated and chance obstructions and erosions to both create and obfuscate meaning. They explore relationships between the general and the specific - how words, ideas, particles, gestures can break down and grow into new forms. Small particles and changes add up - affecting our freedoms, forms of expression, and ability to understand each other.
- Ivia Yavelow