Biography:
Jayne King is a Chicago-born artist and graduate of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (BFA 2022), where she spent her time focusing on ceramics, object collection, and book making. Her work has been exhibited nationally, including at James Watrous Gallery, Povos Gallery, the Joan Flasch Artists’ Book Collection, the Chicago Fine Art Salon, Union Street Gallery, the Bridgeport Art Center, and Woman Made Gallery. King was a 2022 ArtAxis+Haystack Fellowship recipient, a 2022 Chicago Artist Coalition SPARK Grant recipient, 2023 Luminarts finalist, a 2023-2024 CPS Lives Resident Artist, is currently a long-term artist in residence at The Digs Chicago, and is an alumni of the Hyde Park Art Center's Bridge Program. She also teaches ceramics classes at The Digs Chicago, and Made Chicago.
Artist Statement:
My work encourages conversations about the malleable nature of memory, haunted and holy spaces, and the chain of living connection through 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.
