Jenna Perstlinger
"Art is a language. "
click on a highlighted image for more information:
all images ©2007 Jenna Perstlinger
About the artist
Jenna was born in Elmhurst,
Illinois in 1969 but she didn't discover clay until the summer of 1993.
She received her BS in Visual Art in December of 1993 from SUNY
College at New Paltz. After about five years of sitting in front
of a computer for a living (in pre-press and marketing jobs), she went
back to school and completed her MFA at the
University of Colorado in 2003. Jenna's work has been shown in
art festivals in Colorado and at Ink & Clay, a juried show in California.
About the art
Art is a language. It cannot be translated into English. Art is a primary experience; its function is
to express concepts that are not in the dictionary. So don’t believe everything you read.
“A staircase is not just a way of getting from
one floor to another. The stair is
itself a space, a volume, a part of the building… treat the whole staircase as a room (or if it is outside,
as a courtyard). Arrange it so that the stair and the room are one… connect all autonomous households, public
services, and workgroups on the upper floors of buildings directly to the
ground. Keep the stair roofed or
unroofed, according to climate, but at all events leave the stair open at
ground level, without a door, so that the stair is functionally a continuation
of the street.”
Christopher Alexander, A Pattern Language
Why stairs? They’re one of those everyday things no one
looks at, maybe even architects. Stairs show us what’s important, like
entrances. They give us a vantage point
to observe cultural lifelike the Spanish Steps. As terraces,
they conserve fertile topsoil and provide arable land in countries as diverse
as Japan and Peru.
Christopher Alexander talks about stairs as the connection between
public and private space, and as the connection between a building and the
earth. In a vast number of examples,
stairs serve as part of the physical trial of pilgrimage toward sacred ground.
These sculptures start as rolled slabs of clay. The clay is cut into thin strips and then
assembled with scoring and slip into stair-like forms. After being dried very slowly to reduce cracking, each sculpture
is fired to approximately 2014° F over a period of 10 hours. After it cools, glaze is applied with a brush and the
piece is fired again, this time to 1830° F.
Opinions
*coming soon*
Exhibition Schedule
Jenna's work can be seen at the following shows:
Downtown Denver Arts Festival , Denver, CO May 25-28, 2007
Crested Butte Festival of the Arts, Crested Butte, CO August 4&5, 2007
Jenna will be an artist-in-residence at the following location this year:
Women's Studio Workshop , Rosendale, NY November 5 - December 1
Contact this Artist
If you have any questions about the artwork or this artist, please feel free to email her at:
jperstlinger@gmail.com