Yasha Butler completed her BA in the Design and Environmental Analysis Department at Cornell University in 2001, and her MA in the Jewelry/Metalsmithing Department at Rhode Island School of Design in 2016. She has worked with ceramics at Laney College, Penland School of Crafts, Haystack Mountain School of Crafts, and Nuray Ada Workshop. She was a visiting artist at the Art and Design Museum, the Watershed Ceramic Arts Center, and Harvard Ceramics. Butler lives and works in Dublin.
Yasha Butler began her career as a designer and interior architect, but eventually focused solely on producing art. In her work, she seeks simplicity without losing a sense of beauty, focusing on what is simple, necessary, and unexaggerated. When she was working as an interior architect, she felt a lack in the minimalist spaces that she created. In order to create calming and inviting environments, she turned to clay in search of an object that would make the void more vivid and meaningful. The artist's clay vessels, with an archaic texture and color as if excavated from underground, depart from their historical context through their uselessness. The artist is pursuing forms that silence the sound of the space which she occupies, calm the atmosphere, and soften the lines. When shaping the clay material, she transfers the atmosphere that a poem provides to the human soul to the irregular, natural, imperfect, and handmade object that emerges. This object then becomes a means of communication between the artist and the viewer, producing a relaxed, welcomed, and inspired feeling in the viewer