ARTIST STATEMENT
My ceramic studio practice aims to encourage conversations about the nature of memory, the haunted space, and the chain of connection through the reconsideration of the heirloom porcelain object. Currently, I’ve been working on a series of memory amphorae that explore the human desire to safeguard personal narrative and nostalgia, the history of ceramic objects as vessels for storage and preservation, and the ways in which Jewish tradition informs how I’ve come to understand my relationship to my family’s past and my consequential present. These vessels exalt the unseeable things underfoot and consider the intersecting relationships between social invisibility, utilitarian craft history, and the geological mechanisms that both govern and record activity on earth.
My practice references and subverts the histories of porcelain as both a signifier of economic status and humble domestic material in an experimental exploration of formative memory, ecological processes as metaphor, and the relationship between the natural world and the intuitive human feelings it can provoke.
This work is part of the culmination of a body of research focused on the “peat archive”, referring to the strata of decomposed plant matter layers that form the foundation of bog ecosystems, where acidic conditions preserve the bodies of mammals and ancient artifacts. The pieces compare this ecological phenomenon to the archival but ultimately degenerative nature of human memory.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Jayne King is a Chicago-born Jewish artist and recent graduate of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (BFA 2022), where they spent their time focusing on ceramics, object collection, and book making. Their work has been exhibited at Sweetwater Center for the Arts, Povos Gallery, the Joan Flasch Artists Book Collection, SAIC Galleries, and now Woman Made Gallery. King was a 2022 ArtAxis+Haystack Fellowship recipient, a 2022 Chicago Artist Coalition SPARK Grant recipient, will be a 2023 Old Town Arts Fest Emerging Artist, and are currently an artist in residence at The Digs Chicago.
© Jayne King