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Leah Tacha

Brooklyn, New York

Leah Tacha’s work is a response to the unsettling American dismissal of women’s lived experiences, information overload, influencer culture, and ever evolving feminisms. She combines old techniques and materials such as ceramics and printmaking, with new technology like digital decals fired into glazes. The work is meticulously made by hand but is impossible without recent digital and technological printmaking innovations. During the pandemic, Tacha has started to consider different modes of research surrounding the question of how craft, and the relationship of ritual and object, has influenced how we deal with loss, uncertainty, and death -- especially in this moment. Through these works she examines how social and financial status, race, and gender all effect these ceremonies, and the craft objects that remain forever from these traditions.

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leahtacha.com︎ @lbtk︎

Inquire︎

What attracts you to ceramic as a medium? How does this relate (or contradict) the use of digital elements?

There are so many parts of clay that I just find so satisfying. It is a totally sensual medium that can be both stress relieving and stress inducing – squeezing the clay through your fingers, pounding the clay with your fist to start to create a slab, extruding it through different holes to create shapes, kneading and wedging it over and over, praying to the kiln gods that it doesn’t crack or break in a firing. It’s exciting and feels very alive and I am constantly learning from it. I love that there is still so much to discover with it.

I think of my clay sculptures almost as conduits, or structures, for the surface or drawing or photograph to live on. Each piece becomes a way for me to translate a collage or drawing onto this three-dimensional object and then the clay and glaze allows for this oozing, beautiful materiality to emerge from the surface in combination with the imagery. I have been experimenting in my work with how to force collage and sculpture to exist together to create the finished piece. The shape of the sculpture is dictated by the drawing or collage that will exist on it and the drawing the piece is inspired by. I create collages by hand using snaps from my phone, cutouts from magazines, screenshots from searches and scan them and manipulate them in photoshop and then print them onto digital decals that will then be transferred onto the clay. The objects end up being this strange mix of an ancient medium combined with a collection of moments, images and snapshots of our present existence. I am playing with questions around what is “real” versus what is representation.

You’ve described your work as a response to the dismissal of women's lived experiences and information overload and influencer culture. Through the pandemic, you also mention the idea of ritual and daily lived experience as a mother and artist -- can you elaborate on how these things tie together, perhaps especially during the past year?

After I had my baby I felt this sort of embarrassment or shame in my misunderstanding of what it meant to become a mother. What I mean by that is while I was experiencing this sense of overwhelming joy and love for my son, there was this coinciding feeling of being taken by complete surprise at just how difficult the entire experience is after the baby is born. I was embarrassed by how much I simply didn’t know. I felt embarrassed that I didn’t help my friends more when they had their babies, I felt embarrassed that I didn’t realize how isolating motherhood can feel at times and I felt embarrassed that I was just learning about how privileged I was to have the kind of maternal care I did, to have maternity leave and a partner that wanted to be equal in our parenting. And then that embarrassment turned into frustration and at times anger. I felt dismissed in so many areas of my life and I felt like my eyes had just opened to the insane amount of work that mothers are doing constantly and it felt like no one was talking about it except for the mothers. Certainly not the art world and definitely not the professional worlds that I was a part of.

When the pandemic hit I found myself almost paralyzed trying to stay focused on each area of my life that was now condensed into just our one bedroom apartment in Brooklyn. People would say to me “Well, look at the bright side, now you’re getting SO much time with your son!” and this statement made me want to scream.

I was terrified of going outside with Ellis (my son) or letting him touch anything at the beginning of the pandemic, but we were going to go crazy in our apartment if we didn’t start going out to play. We started visiting the local cemetery near our house in Bushwick and this became our little refuge and eventually we developed a routine that started to work for our family. The cemetery became our spot: there was plenty of room to play and I started to enjoy seeing Ellis play in between the graves where I didn’t have to worry about who he was coming into (physical) contact with. I loved looking at the different ways people have left mementos for their loved ones at their graves.

It has never been more obvious to me how impossible, unsustainable, racist and sexist this so-called structure America has setup for families is. Mothers in America are drowning in this pandemic (even though they already were) and I’m not entirely sure if anyone cares. Or maybe it’s not that people don’t care, it’s just that no one knows the answer.

My work is the only way I know how to combat feelings of hopelessness and focus on the daily rituals of my life that keep me going. Fleeting moments of joy and beauty, snapshots of things I long for and thoughts that I am scared of are fired into clay forever, developed as parts of a whole and I try to make sense of the puzzle that we’re living in.

You also pose a question which I'll rephrase: how do you think that craft influences how we deal with loss or uncertainty during challenging times?

Artmaking and craft have always been a part of our rituals and history for dealing with loss. It’s a part of everything from how we remember those who have passed to how we commemorate their lives and how we create joy in our own lives when working through a challenge. At the graveyard that Ellis and I go to I see craft and tiny sculptures all around these graves – from the pinwheels that are stuck in the ground to the rocks that are stacked on the graves. I see craft all over the city right now with the Black Lives Matter banners in apartment windows and murals and handmade flags thanking our essential workers.

I see craft as a source of a comfort even in my own family. My grandmother was an expert quilter. She was a farmer’s wife in Western Kansas and her quilts are incredible works of art that were created out of scraps of fabrics from various moments in her life. She gave me my “wedding quilt” when I was 16 because she didn’t think she would live long enough to be able to give it to me when I eventually did get married. I started sleeping with that quilt immediately though and it gave me comfort when I was a teenager thinking about her meticulously working on this quilt that I was now sleeping under. I think about her quilts often and think that the collage-like aspect of them have had a big impact on me as an artist. Over this past summer my husband and I returned to Kansas for 2 months to stay with my parents and get help with our son during the day. For dinner my mom would create these elaborate tablescapes and tableaus that would rival any installation artist out there and they changed every single night. I think in her own way this was a way of using craft and décor to work through her own anxieties of the pandemic.

I think especially over the past few months we have looked for new ways to make ourselves and our surroundings feel more comfortable and manageable and I think craft plays a big part in achieving that, at least it certainly has for me.

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