For ceramicist Jen Allen, collaboration creates awareness of artistic processes and tendencies, opening the mind to ideas and pursuits otherwise unconsidered. In 2019, she wrote an article for Ceramics Monthly, detailing her collaborative work with artists Kurt Anderson, Maia Leppo, and Bryn Perrott. FOUR SQUARE features their individual and collaborative artwork from the past year.
Creating together allows artists to explore different techniques, mediums, and themes, fostering individual development and growth. FOUR SQUARE celebrates and continues a Penland tradition that everyone learns from each other.
Whether forming a vase that decorates a room or producing dinnerware that celebrates a meal, my work is made to honor and enhance the rhythms of home life. Driven to create for special occasions, I visualize the holiday table brimming with friends, food, flowers, and candlelight. While I enjoy the vibrant energy encircling a festive gathering, I find the contemplative moments sipping a morning cup of coffee equally as invigorating. My work is intended to live in these instances of physical and psychological nourishment.
As a lover of textiles and sewing, I use two dimensional templates to build three dimensional forms out of slabs. I utilize details such as folds, seams, darts, pleats, tufts and ruffles to relate to the craft of a seamstress. It is important that these methods of construction are evident in each finished piece as a nod to process and the pots “life” with the maker.
I am attracted to the raw and the unrefined, the messy and lowbrow. In my work I seek to include imagery that touches on the familiar but is seen through my own distorted lens. I look at the visual language of my environment: advertising logos, cartoons, graphic novels, sports-team mascots, and iconic figures in public life. By including such imagery on the surface of my pottery I hope to connect to the viewer by providing a glimpse of something universal and familiar, yet slightly surreal. I am also influenced by centuries of folk pottery and the archetypal iconography found upon them. It is my hope to show the great amount of admiration I have for this work but also slightly lampoon them.
Traditionally, folk potters used a variety of formulas to compose surfaces of their work. By shuffling and recombining these proven formula, it is my hope that the muse of familiarity appears cross-dressed as innovation.
My process is dictated by the limits that I place on myself: the source of inspiration, my process of design and creating, my use of materials, colors and mechanisms. My work is also drawn from the need to create volume out of flatness. By using almost exclusively steel sheet, I aim to manipulate the material to have a dimension it did not previously have. The forms are inspired by botanical elements, abstracted and simplified to their most basic shape. I design much of my work on a 3-D rendering computer program called Rhinoceros, and then I either send my work to be laser-cut, or I cut it myself. I use silicone cord, steel tubing, and wire to create the finished piece of work. I restrict my color choices to the black, white, and the terracotta color of the industrial silicone. I am interested in scale, volume, movement and repetition and how the computer can help me explore these ideas.
The resulting work is an exploration of the intersection between the botanical and the industrial. Having the work be wearable is a primary goal, but I also want to push that idea and play on the balance between overwhelming and attracting the viewer. I do not want the wearer to look at the jewelry and immediately see a specific plant or flower, but to get the feeling that one gets when seeing or being surrounded by botanicals.
Bryn’s artwork references tattoo imagery, print history, and her love of animals. Though woodcuts are her predominant medium of choice, she also paints and draws extensively. Her work is in many private collections, national and international.
Bryn has worked with major touring acts, authors and companies such as Jackie O’s Brewery, Handymaam, Tommy Orange, Lucero, Laura Jane Grace, Jenny Lewis, All City Cycles and Cory Branan to design album art, t-shirts, guitar pedals, skis, prints, jewelry, coffee packaging, beer cans, book covers and more. She is often recognized by her internet identity, DeerJerk.
To inquire about works in the exhibition contact us at 828.765.6211 or via email at gallerycoordinator@penland.org