Ryana Lawson

A narrow Fellow in the Grass, 2023, Glazed Stoneware with Luster, 23 x 16 x 16 inches. Retail Value: $1200.

Ryana Lawson is a longtime instructor and former artist in residence at Pottery Northwest. Her work is immediately recognizable for its combination of richly handbuilt surfaces, bold color, flora and fauna, and a sense of playfulness that often opens onto much deeper questions about life, death, fear, and transformation. This piece was created for her solo residency exhibition at Pottery Northwest, because I could not stop for Death, a title borrowed from Emily Dickinson’s well-known meditation on mortality and the inevitable cycle of life and death. The title of this urn also comes from Dickinson: A narrow Fellow in the Grass, her poem about the snake, a creature that can inspire fascination and beauty while also provoking an almost instinctive flash of fear.

Lawson plays deliberately with that tension here. The warm, unglazed terracotta contrasts with glossy flowers, butterflies, and the snake itself, down to the flash of silver luster on its tongue. The snake does not simply decorate the urn; it constricts the form, puncturing its surface and emerging from within. Because clay is so often described in bodily terms - as responsive, plastic, almost skin-like - the gesture gives the piece a physical sense of tightening and vulnerability. At the same time, its exuberant color and playful imagery invite us closer. Lawson hopes that attraction gives us a moment to reconsider our own response to the snake, and perhaps to the larger ideas of fear, mortality, and change that it carries with it.