“Over the Chicago Skyline” by Jayne King

20’’ by 7’’ by 7’’

Porcelain and Glazes

$3800

My work encourages conversations about the malleable nature of memory, haunted and holy spaces, and the chain of living connection through a reconsideration of heirloom porcelain objects. At the heart of my artistic impulse is a series of large hand-painted porcelain pots inspired by functional historical forms, such as amphorae and canopic jars, that I refer to as my “memory vessels”. Their surfaces explore the fundamental desire to safeguard personal narrative and nostalgia, the history of ceramic objects as vessels for storage and preservation, and the ways in which Jewish tradition informs how I’ve come to understand my relationship to my family’s past and my consequential present. These vessels exalt the unseeable things underfoot and consider the intersecting relationships between social invisibility, utilitarian craft history, and the geological mechanisms that both govern and record activity on earth. My work references and manipulates the history of porcelain as a signifier of both elevated economic status and humble domestic material in an experimental exploration of narrative memory, ecological processes as metaphor, and the relationship between the natural world and the intuitive feelings it can provoke. I’m especially fascinated by the concept of heritage and its many forms, including not only special objects, but one's body and circumstances as well. These vessels are the culmination of a period of research focused on the "peat archive", a term referring to the strata of decomposed plant matter layers that form the foundation of bog ecosystems, where acidic conditions preserve the bodies of mammals and ancient artifacts. The pieces compare the dual ecological phenomena of decomposition and natural preservation with the archival, but ultimately degenerative, nature of human memory.

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