Jenn Kaplan

MFA | Ceramics

ARTIST BIO

I am an art-scienst-activist with an MFA in Ceramics, a BFA from the Art Institute of Chicago, and a deeply rooted love of gardening. Teaching, like gardening is a profound part of my life, as it has the capacity to nurture and facilitate potential. I have been teaching (mostly. In Chicago) since 2014, everyone from brain surgeons to middle schoolers and bike couriers. Everyone deserves the healing qualities in clay.

ARTIST STATEMENT

Everything is connected and survival is en masse. Hope lives not in isolation but through the potential of collaborative movement. My ceramic practice acts as an emotional and frequently visceral filter for understanding cycles of grief and regrowth, collective and intimate, microbial and energetic. As we attempt to understand repercussions of the anthropocene, we merely fuss over them in human terms, so often selfish in intent. My hope is to grow empathy for human and nonhuman living organisms by paralleling our bilateral symmetries, stimulating the potential in cooperative existence.

Robin Wall Kimmerer through Braiding sweetgrass suggests, “In a garden, food arises from partnership. If I don’t pick up rocks and pull weeds, I’m not fulfilling my end of the bargain. I can do these things with my handy opposable thumb and capacity to use tools to shovel manure. But I can no more create a tomato or embroider a trellis in beans than I can turn lead to gold. That is the plants’ responsibility and their gift: animating the inanimate. Now there’s the gift.”

As in the garden, communities, and any relationship, clay requires tending to. Something will come next, so why not imagine with hope and action.

Vascular Coral from the series, On Borrowing

Self-glazing slip, pure potential (raw) porcelain, gold leaf, and lava rock | 24”x24x2” | 2020

Where I End and You Begin from the series, On Borrowing

Porcelain with hand-mixed underglaze pencil shading | 16”x16x2” | 2021

La Petite Mort from the series (detail), On Borrowing

Porcelain with hand-mixed underglaze pencil shading | 9x6x4” | 2021

Rat King on Gum (Omen)

Porcelain, painted with underglaze wash, crater glaze, and tragedy. | 14x12x3” | 2021

Not all consumption is of the flesh.

Porcelain and medium-rare stain | 6-13” each | 2020

Pollinator Pod

Cone 10 oxidation porcelain with mishima inlay and crater glaze exterior | 36x36x36” | 2021

Pollinator Pod (detail)

Cone 10 oxidation porcelain with mishima inlay and crater glaze exterior | 36x36x36” | 2021

With Gratitude

8” each Cone 10 oxidation porcelain with mishima inlay | 2021

(Gyn) Ecology

Soda-fired porcelain with underglaze pencil marks | 5x4x6” | 2020