Jenny Hata Blumenfield is a Los Angeles based ceramic artist, designer, and curator with a rigorous commitment to the field of Ceramics. Her work subverts existing tropes of the feminine identity, Japanese craft, and the duality of meaning through the lens of playful symbolism.
Blumenfield graduated with Honors from The Rhode Island School of Design with a BFA in Ceramics. In Fall 2022, she launched Studio JBLU- inspired by memories of holidays and summers spent with family in Japan- she reinterprets fleeting moments of play and turns them into moments to hold.
In the artist's own words, "In every part of this work, there is a push-pull present between the optical play, the suggestion of the female body through reference of the vessel, the moments where the clay stretches and scars and then is filled with gold, and the ways in which the glaze explorations presented can be both opaque and transparent all at the same time.
Each step in the building and glazing process is what I think of as a return to the beginning through ceramic process; from coil building, to vessel making, to ash glazes (ashes from burned trees that get reformulated into a glaze). These pieces begin by taking the principles of coil pot building by rolling out coils to stack and build upon to create a recognizable vessel form. The vessel then gets shaven/ sculpted down to a more exaggerated, voluptuous vessel shape. (I tend to focus on traditional hand building methods rather than automating any step of the process such as the usage of mold making or the wheel). The vessel gets spliced in half (a reference to everyone’s first throwing class where the instructor cuts the thrown vessel in half to examine the thickness of the walls) and attach it to slabs of clay. Once the piece has completely dried, it goes through a two-step firing process. When it comes time to glazing the work, it’s a mixture of ash glazes and underglazes. The melting of certain ash glazes on the finished form sometimes has up to 15 glazes applied onto it and brings in an important element of unpredictability; a welcomed contrast to the predictability of the underglazes." — Jenny Hata Blumenfield, 2022
