Jessica Kreutter is a clay artist who works with discarded objects. She received an MFA from The University of Tennessee in 2010. For 10 years previous to graduate school, she worked as an artist, art teacher and social worker in Portland, Oregon. Recently, she has exhibited at Pirate: Contemporary Art, Mütter Museum, Seattle Design Center and the Fort Collins Museum of Art, as well as in group exhibitions in Philadelphia, Washington, Florida, Kentucky, North Carolina and Colorado. She has been a resident artist at ART342, Vermont Studio Center, Anderson Ranch and PlatteForum and is in residence at HCCC through August of 2012.
In small, fragmented installations using found, discarded objects and porcelain, Jessica explores the idea of loss, memory and its transformation through time. Traces of use and decay hold time in suspension and connect these objects to memories of a body that has disappeared. In this fragile moment, Jessica imagines what materializes from these shadows left behind and the body that would exist in these ruins. In the reimaging of the body in clay, the form becomes fragmented and pliant, a combination of flesh, bone, animal and nature. The body begins to invent itself as it both absorbs and imitates its surroundings. These forms embody transformation and transition. They occupy a space of instability where other worlds intercept our own and rules have been suspended.
About her work, Jessica states, “There is a potency held within the spaces that are in-between. These spaces suggest there is something more than what our world has been divided up into, a place between reality and fantasy, a point at which opposing ideas overlap. These moments where boundaries are breached or intersect evoke the possibility of seeing the world differently.”
For more information, please visit www.jessicakreutter.com.
