Jennifer King: beckoning towards a greater horizon

About

Tthis exhibition features ten new ceramic pots that are King’s largest sculptures to date. Designed less with functionality in mind than painterly experiments, the artist considers them “canvases” for her continued experiments with non-traditional glazing, painting, and high-fire techniques.

King, who has an extensive career in making smaller-scaled works, welcomed logistical and sculptural challenges inherent to increased surface and size, perhaps to evoke and demand personal space during pandemic quarantine. Made in her home studio, King wanted these sculptures to viscerally reflect “deeply interdependent yet isolated” experiences in “what [her] family life became.” The hand-coiled vessels are populated by discombobulated narratives that are compositionally dynamic: ironically stressed & relaxed, stern & comedic. Anatomy rolls, twists, stretches, and squishes around every external surface as carnivalesque wrangling disrupts King’s “bucolic existence with violent backdrop.” That said, elements of nature evident in each work — water, birds, crystals, flowers — temper humanity by widening Earth’s lens, reminding viewers (and maker) that solitude and stationary residence offers grand opportunities for deepened environmental observations and connections. 

King appreciates functional, domestic forms as “testing grounds” that invoke conversations about art historical boundaries about gender assumptions and craft. Her last body of work was about motherhood, and she loves subject matter and material treatments that provocatively reference “women’s work.” To King, this forefronts her Feminist politic and personal interest in correlating domestic forms to “stabilizing environments” she aspires to in her own caretaking positions. This in part may come from her rigorous studies with mentor Betty Woodman, while the comfort and pride in hand-built gestures, fingerprints, textures, vibrant palettes, and embedded texts conjure Ree Morton. 

Care and durability are intrinsic to attitude and style, in large part created by King’s labor-intensive painting and firing techniques. These vessels endure up to four kiln sessions that celebrate reversal of typical processes. White underglazes get clear, glossy coats typically saved for last, and earn a firing to prepare her “canvases.” Layers of bisque painting follow with bright, runny, and graphic colors that may require two to three more high firings. The stoneware’s oxidation brings harlequin colors and unexpected moments in texture, depth, and complexity, as well as establishes these as harbingers of fortitude and vivacity in results that resemble Majolica despite different glazing procedures.

Dosed with rustic survivalism, humans hang tough here while repeatedly cooked, like witches, in trials by fire. Ancient invincibility is summoned in vase shapes that sometimes approximate the ovoidal Greco-Roman pithos (ollas) that outlived Pompeii’s multiple disasters. As storage for grain and wine, these containers were also used for burying the dead. However, copious rainbows, floral motifs, and signifiers of loving connection (touching hands, juicy red lips) easily distinguish these from funerary urns. These depict life in cyclical formatting: torrential uncertainty roiling often beautifully, towards renewal.