Jessica Jackson Hutchins
Liste Year
Year of Birth
Country of Birth
Presented by
2021
1971
United States
Adams and Ollman
Jessica Jackson Hutchins’ tactile and intimate works reflect an ongoing engagement with materials and forms. Composed of an array of everyday objects, some found, some personal, her pieces are accumulations of quotidian life and mundane rituals transformed into reverential objects that are as idiosyncratic as they are familiar.
In this new series of small-scale sculptures, Hutchins focuses exclusively on the possibilities of the one material for which she is best known—ceramic. Each is composed from multiple forms—some figurative, some vessel-like—that nestle, support and embrace one another. Their precarity and simplicity underscore the expressive, intuitive, immediate and intimate qualities of her medium while speaking directly to the human condition. Glazed in earthy tones of brown, green and blue, each gesture of touching, leaning, balancing contains an emotional intensity that creates a space for contemplation.
Jessica Jackson Hutchins, A Record of Pure Happiness
- Jessica Jackson Hutchins, Triad
- Jessica Jackson Hutchins, Scholars
- Jessica Jackson Hutchins, Possibly
- Jessica Jackson Hutchins, Either/And Stone
Kelly Reichardt: I think if I saw a Jessica piece anywhere, I would know —it's so distinctive. You obviously have your own particular language, but there must have been a period of time growing into that, where you at some point trusted your own voice enough.
Jessica Jackson Hutchins: You know, I wasn't classically trained. So I think, lining up my formal gestures with my values and intention of what I wanted them to be, was all I ever worked on. So that was the only thing I ever did...I've only ever thought that using the right hand gesture, the right color, the right anything was the same as using the right word in a sentence.
—Jessica Jackson Hutchins in conversation with American filmmaker Kelly Reichardt
Jessica Jackson Hutchins (b. 1971 in Chicago, Illinois; lives and works in Portland, Oregon) has recently had solo exhibitions at Columbus College of Art and Design in Columbus, OH (2016); the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum (2014); the Hepworth Wakefield Museum (2013); the Broad Art Museum in East Lansing, MI (2013); and the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston, MA (2011). Significant group exhibitions include Makeshift at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center, where Hutchins first premiered her performance work; the 55th Venice Biennale, The Encyclopedic Palace (2013); and The Whitney Biennial (2010). Her work is included in the following public collections: the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; the Brooklyn Museum, New York; the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; the Margulies Collection, Miami; and the Portland Art Museum, Portland. Upcoming exhibitions include Ceramics in the Expanded Field at MASS MOCA and Working Thought at the Carnegie Museum of Art where she will debut a major new site specific glass installation. Hutchins holds a BA in Art History from Oberlin College and an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Jessica Jackson Hutchins studio, Portland, Oregon 2021
"[U]sing ceramic gave me more immediate access to all these histories we've been discussing, since it has been around everywhere, forever. In basic ways, clay allowed me to start thinking about vases and cups as sculptures, but also still as themselves. I started thinking about sculpture in a very direct and elemental way. I get so much pleasure out of every aspect of it: the handling of the clay, the challenges of the firing process, the color, and the surprises of the glazing process. The more I've learned about ceramic, the more I've wanted to push it, and that is all kind of circular." -Jessica Jackson Hutchins in conversation with Jenelle Porter upon the occasion of her 2011 exhibition at The Institute of Contemporary Art Boston.