Collection: Jessica Kreuter

Jessica Kreutter grew up in Denver, CO, received a BA in Anthropology/Sociology from Lewis & Clark College in Portland, OR and received a MFA in ceramics from The University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Jessica has been a resident artist at Anderson Ranch, Vermont Studio Center, Art342, PlatteForum, Caldera, Oregon College of Art and Craft, The Houston Center for Contemporary Craft and Red Lodge Clay Center.  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), Site131 (Dallas) and The Mütter Museum in Philadelphia. In Houston, she has exhibited at Art League Houston, BLUEorange and SITE Gallery at the Silos for Sculpture Month Houston. Most recently, Jessica exhibited work in the Craft Texas biennial at Houston Center for Contemporary Craft and the Rotunda Gallery in Houston City Hall for Sculpture Month Houston. She served on the board of Box 13 Artspace, a non-profit artist run studio and exhibition space and served for three years as an advisory board member of ClayHouston.  She is a full-time art faculty member at Houston Community College where she teaches ceramics and sculpture. 

Notes from the Artist

Aesthetic Vision

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 in my installations 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 ecstasy or through intense connections to spiritual or inner worlds. These forms embody transition and become conduits for memory and fantasy. 

Process

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.

https://www.jessicakreutter.com/