Most people tend to stay away from things they fear, but Lorien Stern prefers looking at danger with a smile on her face. She found huge success as a ceramic artist by creating sculptures that find humor and light in things and creatures that pretty much everyone finds scary.
Stern is based in the small town of Inyokern, California, but she moved to Los Angeles after graduating from California College of the Arts. A happy accident was all it took for her to develop her personal style. She misunderstood an in-class assignment and made the first in the series of her signature shark sculptures after thinking the instructor asked her to craft a “6-inch fear”.
Her sharks with giant grins look scary and silly at the same time, and so do many of her other creations. Sterk is firmly committed to exploring unsettling subjects in a humorous way, in the hope they’ll help other people overcome their fears like they’ve helped her.
“I like making them look kinda goofy or in bright colors or smiling as a way to disarm my fear. That’s a secret theme in my work: finding the harmony in sad and happy things and making scary things approachable,” Stern told My Modern Met.
