New works by Yizhak Elyashiv, David Newton, and Judyth van Amringe, all of whom reside in Providence, will be on view at the David Winton Bell Gallery from June 8 through July 7, 2002. The relationship between these artists' work is elusive. Exhibition curator and Bell Gallery director, Jo-Ann Conklin, notes a quiet tone that the objects possess, despite obvious differences in medium (Elyashiv works in drypoint and monotype; Newton in wood; van Amringe in porcelain and stoneware). "The artists share a maturity of vision, and a skilled use of materials."

Yizhak Elyashiv will be represented by a selection of prints, the centerpiece of which is a large (8 x 12 foot) untitled work created during his residency at Island Press at Washington University, St. Louis. The print, shown for the first time at the Bell Gallery, comprises 92 one-foot-square metal plates that create an underlying grid on which a random series of coordinates float; lines are scribed between coordinates, each of which is marked by a brown, ochre, or green smear of pigment. This impressive work is related to the series of works entitled Handful of Grain Maps, which Elyashiv began in 1994. The artist's continuing interest in systems of order, and variation within set parameters, is obvious.

Elyashiv currently teaches at Rhode Island College and the Rhode Island School of Design, where he received his MFA in 1992. His prints are in the collections of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the British Museum, London; Yale University Art Gallery; and the Fogg Art Museum at Harvard, among other institutions.

Grove, David Newton's sculptural installation, includes a series of hand-carved wooden figures, some taken from a cherry tree felled in the backyard of his Cranston home. Whimsical and abstract, each figure consists of several distinct parts: a triangular "foot" topped by a highly polished, bulbous "body" and a roughly cut, peanut-shaped "head"; or a round, red-stained foot with an oblong, rough-cut, white-stained body and highly polished, natural wood head with upturned nose. The use of color on some pieces gives a playful cartoon-like quality, while the titles of individual works—such as Grove and Stand—bring us back to the origins of his materials.

Currently on the faculty of Moses Brown School, Newton has taught at RISD, Roger Williams University, and the University of Connecticut, and was previously director of the Lacoste School of Arts in France. He attended Pratt Graphic Center and the Art Student's League in New York and received his MFA from Bard College.

Inspired by the work of Rudi Staffel, Judyth van Amringe recently turned to ceramics, studied at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, and was awarded the prestigious Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award in 2001. Her seemingly natural gift for porcelain and stoneware draws on years of experience in home design and an obsessive aesthetic.

Van Amringe embraces horror vacui: in her home all surfaces are decorated, and her ceramics are displayed, in mass and without recognizable order, on an oversized dining room table. Her titles—Moss Nest and Coral, for example—indicate inspiration drawn from nature. Eggs and Bones is a large mound of porcelain eggs and stoneware bones. The eggs are broken open as if left after hatching and the bones are covered with the encrustation of ancient objects. A combination burial ground and nest, Eggs and Bones speaks eloquently of the cycle of life and death. Van Amringe's ceramics are, more than anything else, evocative of objects excavated from the depths of the ocean or an ancient burial site. Some are otherworldly, others shamanistic.

Van Amringe graduated from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, in 1967. She has made a living within New York's fashion world for many years, particularly in the area of home decoration. The author of Home Art—a 1994 guidebook to the wackier extremes of home decoration featuring flamboyantly colored and decorated domestic furnishing—she contributes regularly to House and Garden.