It took me a moment to realize that the charred bricks on the auction table were not what they seemed. They were arranged in three rows and looked like the scarred ruins from a fire.
As I edged closer, I realized that they were not some throwaways. They appeared to be fired ceramic art pieces with textured gray surfaces glazed in cream and aqua. The bottom sides were smoother, and bore a carved keyhole and a number. The artwork was an assemblage and each piece was likely to be arranged by number.
The artist had deep-cut her name into each: Leslie Eadeh.
I’d never heard of her, so I Googled. She is a local artist, one of many whom I’ve come across at auction who worked below the radar. They are usually well-known in local and regional artists’ circles, but not much beyond that.
A sculptor who creates in clay, Leslie Weaver Eadeh attended the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, receiving a four-year certificate in 1984. She also attended Rosemont College in Rosemont, PA, and Albright College in Reading, PA.
Eadeh’s works have been shown in many local exhibitions and have garnered some awards. In 2017, she exhibited in a group show of 50 works by women artists from the Greater Philadelphia area curated by the Delaware Art Museum in Wilmington. Titled “Assemblage: A Regional Collective of Women Artists,” it featured works ranging from realism to abstract, and included paintings, prints, drawings, three-dimensional art and found objects.
Assemblage was the name of an organization of women artists founded in 1985 and of which Eadeh was a member. A group of recent women art-school graduates gathered monthly to talk about art and support each other’s work. The women held their first exhibition in 1991. The group – whose membership has changed over the years – has participated in local, national and international shows. They have also exhibited their works individually and as a group, and their individual works are in private and public collections.
The Delaware exhibit was said to be Assemblage’s largest show.
Eadeh has also participated in art exhibits in Key West, FL, including Art in the Park and Sculpture Key West. In 2003, she wrote about her approach to clay sculpture:
“I started working with clay 12 years ago and it has continued to be my primary medium. Although I still paint and occasionally make prints, sculpting in clay still allows me to combine more of the elements that interest me. First, simplicity of form, either abstracted from nature or used directly (such as the sphere) is important. Then, the surface treatment usually adds a baroque element to the piece.
“In a way I think of my work as opera. The basic form (i.e. plot) is simple. In opera it is usually love desired, love won, love lost or some variation of these. In my work the themes are simple: time lines, spheres, moons and beams, etc. In opera music, voices, costumes, stage and all the rest are used to tell the emotional story – the true story, the story of the heart. Through the use of a simple form with variation, manipulation, color, texture and or specific installation I tell the story of my heart.”
Here are some of her works. In the 1990s, she apparently operated her own art gallery that exhibited other artists.
Eadeh and her husband Ernest, a real estate developer, commissioned a mural that was painted on the side of a barbershop near a corner in Berwyn, PA, in 2005. She learned about the artist – Karl Yoder, who works with Mural Arts Philadelphia – while attending an international mural convention in the city.
You can’t miss the huge painting of a Fourth of July Parade at the turn of the century with faces from Berwyn and its history.
At auction, as I handled the pieces, I could hear a slight clanging. So I shook one and realized that the artist had inserted something inside that rattled when the “brick” was shaken.
Here are more up-close photos of the pieces:
