Lark Wicinas
- Anna Lilli Garai
- Sep 26
- 4 min read
Lark Wicinas lives and works in Portland, Maine, where she creates layered mixed media works using materials like copper leaf, patina and paint. She experiments with how these surfaces react to air, salt and time, letting the elements play a part in the process. Her practice is shaped by what’s around her — the coast, the fog, old maps, everyday tools. She runs a community ceramics studio and a design business with her partner, and often switches between building things and making art. Her works carry the traces of this balance.
Q: Living by the coast, how does the rhythm of tide and weather shape your way of working?
A: I am lucky enough to live in Portland, Maine, just two blocks from the ocean. From the back porch of my partner’s and my ceramic studio, you can glimpse the water through the trees in winter. The rhythm of the tide here is inescapable, a constant reminder to step outside my own head. Its vastness dwarfs whatever might be spinning in my mind: while I sleep, the tides rise and fall, the weather shifts, the wind reshapes the day. In contrast, I am tiny! That humility lends me perspective—enough to ease, to keep my practice moving. Almost like a mantra, the ocean’s presence reminds me, many times a day: shh, there are bigger things than this.
Q: You run a ceramics school and a design studio alongside your art. How do those roles feed into your studio work?
A: I work across three planes—ceramics, digital art, and everything 2D—and sometimes switch between them in the span of an hour! Growing up, I beat myself up for never keeping a daily sketchbook like a “real artist.” Only recently did I realize that while I don’t keep a traditional sketchbook, I’m now constantly drawing—drafting client illustrations, preparing designs for ceramics, or finding time to paint. In effect, I draw every day! With two fledgling businesses, balancing time for my studio practice is still quite a challenge, but I’m grateful that my other work keeps me warmed up and in creative motion.
Q: What first drew you to working with copper leaf and patina as core materials?
A: I was first inspired by Jackie Morris’ book The Lost Words and by the work of Lauren Brevner. Their approach—lifting subjects out of their expected habitats—seemed to sanctify them. As an undergraduate, I studied art history with a focus on medieval manuscripts, where gold leaf was used to signal the holy.
I began to wonder: what if the “mundane” could be elevated in the same way? The ocean and its creatures already carry a kind of sacredness—what if they, too, were treated as godly, if only for a moment?
Q: In "Flicker" the fish seem frozen in motion while the copper keeps changing. How do you see that tension between stillness and time?
A: Time is a kind of motion, a form of progress. To paint is to hold something in one place, but is anything ever truly still if everything ages? When "Flicker" was shown in a local gallery, a viewer asked if it referenced an archaeological cross-section—the fish suspended in rock, with veins of metal running through the earth around it. I thought that was an interesting read, though perhaps too static. As I create I consider balance; stillness always carries time within it, and with time comes motion and forward progression. The tension between the two is ever current.
Q: "Apiary Spring" sets corrosion against a sense of renewal. Do you see this contrast as central to your practice?
Corrosion and renewal aren’t central to my practice, but I include in my work a sense of darkness threaded through an otherwise optimistic creation. In this piece, the looming presence takes the shape of the corrosion amongst an outwardly bright concept. I’m always drawn to work that feels just a little haunting, a little ominous. Though real Mainers roll their eyes, I’m a devoted admirer of Andrew Wyeth for this very reason—he often tucks a foreboding detail into the corner of an otherwise benign scene. "Apiary Spring" gestures towards the cycle of all things—everything contains both dark and light, and everything rests in a balance.
Q: Your pieces often sit between calm and unease. Is that duality something you also look for outside of art?
A: I’m not sure I seek it out beyond art, but I think this duality exists in everything. It’s cliché, but it’s another form of good and bad, dark and light—I see it in nature all around me. The ocean to the north can be roiling while it looks calm to the south. If everything were good all the time, would anything feel great? You need the dark for context. I don’t chase it in life, but I notice it. And in my work, weaving the foreboding into the joyful has become a persistent thread.
