Red Lodge Clay Center – Short-Term Resident (AIA) 2022
Jessica Kreutter grew up in Denver, CO and moved to Portland, OR to get a BA in Anthropology/Sociology from Lewis & Clark College. For ten years after, she worked as a studio artist and teacher before going back to graduate school at The University of Tennessee, Knoxville to earn a MFA in Ceramics. She was a studio school student at Oregon College of Art and Craft and later returned as an artist in resident.
Jessica has also been a resident artist at Anderson Ranch, Vermont Studio Center, Art342, PlatteForum, Caldera and The Houston Center for Contemporary Craft. On these journeys, she designed an ice sculpture in collaboration with the Museum of Contemporary Art (Denver) and created an unfired clay installation for the National Council on Education for the Ceramic Arts (NCECA) Project Space which is featured in the January 2014 Issue of Ceramics Monthly. In 2016, she was a recipient of a Houston Arts Alliance Individual Artist Grant. Jessica has shown at Vertigo Gallery (Denver), Castle Gallery (New York), Red Arrow Contemporary(Dallas) and The Mütter Museum in Philadelphia. Currently, she serves on the board of Box 13 Artspace, a nonprofit artist run studio and exhibition space in Houston, TX and is an advisory board member of Clay Houston. She is a full-time art faculty member at Houston Community College where she teaches ceramics and sculpture.
I am interested in creating moments where worlds flow together. These moments suggest there is something more than what appears to be: a place that is inhabited by both reality and fantasy, a place between remembering and forgetting where beauty and disgust are intertwined. These points where boundaries are dissolved reveal different possibilities for how to imagine the world.
The porcelain objects have disrupted borders. I want to capture a form as it changes from a contained, operating organism to something uncontained, fragmented and entwined with nature, animals and objects. This transformation of form, body or self is something we may experience in deep grief or death, in sexual ecstasy or through intense connections to spiritual or inner worlds. These forms embody transition and become conduits for memory and fantasy.
I hand build forms with porcelain clay. Decorative elements on pieces come from the ornamentation found on house architecture and domestic objects. Most pieces are comprised of many individually built parts and assembled on site depending on the architecture of the space. I am interested in the marks of use and traces of decay on abandoned objects, places or architecture and use these in combination with porcelain sculpture to connect these remnants to a body or memory that has disappeared.