Dana Lazarus Cass moved from New York City to the UK 25 years ago, and after a career working in a variety of capacities in the photography industry, both in New York and for many years in London, she took a new direction, gaining a BA (Hons) in Ceramics from University of Westminster in June 2012.
Dana’s fascination is with exploring the vast array of properties that clay lends itself to, allowing her to create visual narratives that investigate questions of “being human”. Her use of the thrown object references the domestic utilitarian ware. This base object creates a landscape that creates a type of architectural setting for her cast slip clay miniature human characters to play out their various roles on. The questions Lazarus-Cass’ asks her audience to consider involve the darkness of isolation and loneliness which are exaggerated by the “voyeuristic” sense of peering into a scene from above. These works often a hold a twist of visual humour which served up through the use of mixed media in the form of glass, rubber, string and sand, etc., There is a definite sense of the absurd and the surreal in Lazarus-Cass’s work.
Dana’s base pallet of colours: black, earthenware red and white harkens to work of Native American Indians which she finds so compelling and organic. Use of bright turquoise and orange glazes to give accents marks brings the work into a thoroughly modern arena and further stimulates the visual encounter with her pieces.
