Kindred Spirits, on view at Sullivan Goss through May 24, is a sculptural garden of earthly delights celebrating the collaborative ceramics made by Patrick Hall and Lynda Weinman. Each piece marries one of Hall’s elegant and symmetrical bases to a top section created by Weinman using computer-aided 3D modeling. While Hall’s vessels follow the venerable ceramic art tradition of vases and bowls, Weinman’s quirky contributions put a different spin on the idea, reimagining vessels that resemble the anatomical tubes that carry blood, or perhaps cephalopod tentacles, or even the stems of exotic plants.
Weinman, a local luminary and highly successful internet education entrepreneur will be familiar to many of you as a generous sponsor of — among many other things — the Santa Barbara International Film Festival and UCSB Arts & Lectures. Since selling Lynda.com in 2015, her instinct for teaching, learning, and creation has led her to become increasingly involved in ceramics. Beginning just over a year ago, in the last months of the pre-pandemic, her artistic plot thickened when she started avidly pursuing — and really pioneering — the nascent technology of 3D printing ceramic art.
Enter veteran ceramicist Patrick Hall, a designer, architect, and passionate ceramic artist going back four decades, who has kept his Clay Studio in Goleta open for many years. A still-new partnership with gifted — and generous — neophyte Weinman resulted not only in the unique collaborative body of work on exhibit at Sullivan Goss, but also in the evolution of Hall’s original Clay Studio into a vast new 28,000-square-foot structure at the rural-ish end of Fairview Avenue.