Jenny Swanson is a ceramic artist who lives and maintains a studio in Cornish Flat, NH. She constructs ceramic wall pieces and clay assemblages by collaging together stoneware, porcelain, and glaze. Her focus is on exploring the potentiality of the ceramic process, issues of sustainability, and ambiguous definitions of beauty. Swanson is inspired by what’s around her, especially looking closely at plant life, growth, and chaos in the surrounding land. Recently she has been combining her eclectic interests: her rural environment, travel memories, and imagined landscapes and motifs from Indian cultural arts which connect to her heritage on her mother’s side. Using an intuitive and experimental approach to materiality and process, she makes arrangements that describe the beauty of the organic and its imperfections. In her hand-built clay work, the simple color palette comes from classic high fire glazes chosen for reflective and absorbing qualities. The pieces are fired at high temperature in a reduction kiln.
Jenny Swanson was born in Boston and raised in Seattle. Her journey in ceramics began in a class at her public high school and continued while studying ceramics at Bennington College, Bennington, VT with Jane Aebersold and Stanley Rosen. In 1984 she received an MFA in Ceramics from Cranbrook Academy of Art, Bloomfield Hills, MI; her teacher was renowned ceramic artist Jun Kaneko. Jenny has a studio and home in Cornish Flat, NH. She works at Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH where she has been lead instructor and director of the ceramics program since 2004. Her work has been exhibited throughout the U.S. and in Turkey, South Korea, Japan, China and the U.K. In 2017, she was a resident artist at the Shangyu International Ceramic Center in China, and her work is in the permanent collection of the Shangyu Art Museum. She recently had a two-person exhibit at the Davidow Fine Art and Design Center at Colby-Sawyer College in New London, NH. Click here to view Jenny Swanson’s website.
All exhibitions and events are always free and open to the public.
