Meet the new Keyholder Residents!

"The Keyholders of Pyramid Atlantic"--is a pretty epic title to hold, so its fitting that Lee and Ripley are rather cool.

Lee

With a background in printmaking and book arts, Lee came to Pyramid with plans to create a large-scale Lithograph, but before taking the plunge, Lee is warming up with some miniature Polar Bears. She has an interest in the strange world of Natural History museums, where one can learn about the world around through exposure to displays of stuffed animals and plastic plants curated to educate visitors about a world that would be otherwise unavailable to them. Playing with the idea of taking objects out of context and putting them on display, Lee is building several matchbook sized display cases to hold drawings of a stuffed “Ursus Maritimus."

Lee took her first printmaking class in her senior year of college, but was quickly hooked, and spent the next five years at Kala Art Institute in Berkley, California. After that, she hopped off to the University of Tennessee where she got her MFA in printmaking, which led her to seek a Master's of Library Science at the University of Iowa.

Ripley

A former intern at Pyramid, it is exciting to see Ripley come back as a keyholder resident. She has several projects planned, and hopes to take full advantage of her time at Pyramid to strengthen her portfolio while learning and working within a supportive artistic community. Using traditional artistic techniques as well as the practical skills she learned as a professional mariner, Ripley is designing and building objects such as: paper furniture built from pulp cast into puzzle shapes, hand-made sheets of paper that fold together to create three-dimensional formal structures, and typically disposable products raised up as fine art—displayed in showcases made from book-binding materials. These projects aim to blur the line between utility and art in order to call attention to the engineering and design of disposable products often taken for granted or forgotten by those who use them.

Ripley graduated from Cooper Union in 2005 with her BFA in Visual Art. Since then, she has divided her time between art making and working in the maritime field as a sailing instructor or in the staff of a maritime museum.

Want more Ripley? Join us on March, 8^th from 6:30 to 7:30 for a talk and demonstration from the lady herself!