Yasha Butler

Yasha Butler completed her undergraduate degree in the Design and Environmental Analysis Department at Cornell University in 2001, and her graduate education in the Jewelry/Metalsmithing Department at Rhode Island School of Design in 2016. She has worked with ceramics at Laney College, Penland School of Crafts, Haystack Mountain School of Crafts, and Nuray Ada Studio. She has been a visiting artist at the Art and Design Museum, the Watershed Ceramic Arts Center, and Harvard Ceramics. She currently lives and works in Istanbul.

Yasha Butler began her career as a designer and interior architect, but eventually focused solely on producing art. In her work, she seeks simplicity without losing a sense of beauty, focusing on what is simple, necessary, and unexaggerated. When working as an interior architect, she felt a lack in the minimalist spaces she created. In order to create calming and inviting environments, she turned to clay in search of an object that would make the void more vivid and meaningful. The artist's clay vessels, with an archaic texture and color as if excavated from underground, depart from their historical context through their uselessness. The artist is pursuing forms that silence the sound of the space she occupies, calm the atmosphere, and soften the lines. When shaping the clay material, she transfers the atmosphere that a poem provides to the human soul to the irregular, natural, imperfect, and handmade object that emerges. This object then becomes a means of communication between the artist and the viewer, producing a relaxed, welcomed, and inspired feeling in the viewer.

Yasha Butler begins her work with geometric shapes such as circles, triangles, and squares, applying surface and dramatic changes to highlight their boundaries and curves. She creates beauty and balance by disrupting the perfect geometry of a piece.

Driven by the desire to create objects that bring a calming poetic feeling to a space, Yasha Butler develops a "simple, elegant, and organic" artistic practice. Rather than focusing on a specific time period, she aims to create objects that belong to both the past and the future. With organic shapes, natural texture, and colors that have faded over time, she intends to transport the viewer to forgotten lands.