Lynn Dau

I was born in Los Angeles, California and as a child I spent a week each summer at my grandmother’s house in Fresno. We called her house the Fresno junkyard. She lived in a rundown house filled with nuts and bolts and rolls of printed vinyl that she sold at the flea market to earn a living… I now know that grandma’s house was not a junkyard; it was a treasure trove.

Although art always brought me great joy and satisfaction when it came time to choose a career I pursued a degree in law and employment as a Deputy Public Defender… [I] was strongly committed to the cause of defending the criminally accused and the Bill of Rights, [but] I always felt that art was my true calling. When I decided to leave the practice of law I started taking ceramics classes at Foothill College in Los Altos. I continued to study ceramics for several years. Eventually, I decided to broaden my education with drawing, painting and art history. In 2017 I completed my MFA with a concentration in spatial art at San Jose State University in California. I loved the art program at SJSU so much that I never left; I started teaching there right after graduation and continue to teach beginning sculpture classes there to this day.

​I use the ordinary to create the unexpected. I am a builder who uses a variety of materials and processes with an affinity for working with found objects as units of fabrication. The themes explored in my work, although personal in origin, speak to the human condition, including identity and the complexities of interpersonal relationships. There is nothing exceptional about home, marriage and family, so I find it natural as I visually explore the dynamics of human relationships and everyday lives, to incorporate ordinary everyday objects. I am influenced by surrealist imagery and my manipulation of materials strives to reflect the idiom “things are not always what they seem”. Through this narrative work I invite the viewer to consider serious content by employing humor and exaggeration.