Leonie Lacouette's studio sits amid wooded, softly rolling hills in rural Ulster County, New York. It occupies the former barn of her family home, just a few steps away, which is crammed to the rafters with a dizzying array of ephemera. "All my life my parents have been collectors," says Leonie. "Not of anything specific; they're just into amassing stuff."

Clearly the penchant for clutter with which she grew up influenced her early clocks: they often featured jumbles of found objects exploding out of cast ceramic heads. However, these days it is the dialogue between the past and a present, more pared-down life inspired by the landscape's natural eloquence that reverberates through her timepieces.

Lacouette was born (in 1960) and raised in Manhattan, the daughter of an artist and an actress. Though her father became a printer and her mother eventually left acting, both parents heartily supported Lacouette's creative pursuits. "When I was a kid, my father and I would go to Central Park together," she recalls. Their encouragement led Lacouette to the High School of Art & Design, the to SUNY New Paltz, where she earned her Bachelor of Fine Arts in ceramics in 1983. The college was situated near the family's weekend farm house in Wallkill, and she convinced her parents to move there permanently, leaving the frenetic existence of New York behind.

Yet the city's congestion, the art industrial chic of Soho and the electric pace of city life all made their way into Lacouette's early work. Given the clutter at home and the bombardment of stimuli that lay outside her apartment door near Times Square, assemblage was a natural progression. Many of the clocks were crowded with the flotsam and jetsam of life - found objects, charts and diagrams from encyclopedias, miniature reproductions of common items like toasters or classical busts or violins - and often topped with a pediment of corrugated steel of other scrap metal. Somewhere, too, there usually appeared a checkerboard pattern, which Lacouette views as a kind of "yin and yang." "They transmitted," she says "a sense of memory and shared existence, elements people could relate to on a personal level." This early work was enormously successful, appearing in the pages of Home magazine, The New York Times, The Crafts Report and Hudson Valley magazine.

Lacouette still likes putting together these narrative and free-associative pieces because she finds "a playfullness there." The checkerboard still puts in an appearance, and familiar, everyday objects still float through many of her compositions. Yet, though Lacouette will never probably never be accused of being a minimalist, she finds herserself "moving toward a more basic geometry." Indeed, more recent clocks are little more than the construction and combination of various shapes (squares, circles, rectangles, triangles) made primarily out of sheet copper and various metal leafs, which, she says, possess an inherent warmth. "It's a practical concern, but also a lifestyle concern," she explains. "I'm into simplifying my life. There's a part of me that wants to clean up my act, to get rid of the junk."

Though materials and forms may vary, the feeling of assemblage - of different elements pieced together, applied and layered - is ever present. What has been traded is a sense of agitation and action, for that of quietude and serentity. As Lacouette explains, "When you're an art student, you long to do something different. Now I want to do something beautiful. The idea that the work has a warmer look is good."