jessica jackson hutchins

Jessica Jackson Hutchins employs hand-formed ceramic vessels, household furniture

and collage to articulate sculptural forms that interrogate the space between the

banal and the sublime. Her sculptures and collages put found objects and familiar

materials in conversation, resulting in poetic abstractions where aggregate forms

transcend the immediacy of their common parts. The insistent materiality of her

sculptures and their raw surfaces yields to a humor and intimacy that solicits an

empathic response in the viewer.

Patently abstract, the works in this exhibition all point indirectly toward

figurative forms. Some pieces originate with furnishings taken from the artist’s

home, which invests them with both an emotional urgency and an acute specificity.

These care-worn domestic objects bear the familiar marks and dents of encounters

with bodies and things; casual imperfections that humanize them. In other pieces,

Hutchins pulls prints and casts impressions directly from furniture: She makes

collages on prints that capture the carved and inked surface of a dining-room

table, and two sculptures assume the bulky mass of an old green arm chair.

The two chair-forms take on the general shape and presence of the absent furniture,

and are thus scaled in a specific relation to the viewer’s body. In Leaning Figure,

an ochre-pigmented and newspaper-collaged mass resting against the wall is

comically perched on top of a too-short bench. Two irregular ceramic vessels are

placed on top of this totemic stack and a small ripped patch of faded denim

indicates the general vicinity of a right knee. In another, Last Unicorn, the same

chair inspires a white plaster cone that is a joyful, colorful fabric-adorned base

for a fluted ceramic bowl and a ceramic mortar and pestle.

The use of ceramics in the work simultaneously signifies domestic utility and the

realm of historical artifacts. But Hutchins’ vessels also generate metaphors for

bodies and body parts (both literal and fantastic) as regenerative or spiritual

containers. Hutchins’ expansive vocabulary is deeply invested in the innate human

ability to recognize and associate with others and objects.