Exhibition

New Work by Jessie Williams (November 2024-January 2025) at Erica Tanov

Opening Reception
Thursday, November 14 • 6-8 pm
Erica Tanov Berkeley, 1827 Fourth Street

New work includes large-scale weavings, small ink and watercolor paintings as well as elegant ceramic vessels. Come celebrate the holiday season with colorful textures, materials and compositions.

ARTIST STATEMENT

Ceramics and weaving are the most basic art forms — to eat from and to wear. Food and warmth. For the maker, there is delight in the material and meditative hours of labor. I made these “Emergency Blanket Weavings” over the course of a couple of years, time spent with the metronomic mechanics of the loom while thinking about the inherent poetry of the material.* A blanket to save your life. The shift from crisis time to craft time. A hopefulness for the future. The connections and kindness that can emerge in times of crisis. Someone wraps a blanket around you.

There are two distinct rhythms in my art making practice — moving fast and moving slow. Being thoughtful and being instinctive. “Confluences” is a series of small paintings in response to the long hours of weaving — making connections in the wet channels of watercolor and ink that flow into each other as fluid warp and weft. A sense of play and discovery and endless possibilities within the limit of 3”x3" pieces of paper collected in an old wooden box. Larger paintings grew from there as well as Confluences on ceramic vessels, as relief ceramic wall pieces and small sculptures in clay. 

In the process of experimentation, I created a series of “Wands” to sample glazes.  So satisfying to stir these in pots of color and see them transform in the alchemy of the kiln.  It reminds me of the childhood joy in a new box of crayons or a new tin of color pencils.  These Wands became keys or teeth or chimes, all of which I felt I needed right now.

*mylar emergency blankets, cut into strips and woven on a loom

Project

EMERGENCY BLANKET WEAVINGS

I have been experimenting with weavings made of mylar foil emergency thermal blankets. This lightweight material is used for first aid body warmth maintenance, emergency shelter, protection from weather, or reflective distress signals. Using both floor looms and table top looms, I weave a weft of strips cut from the mylar blankets and a warp of mason twine (used for marking invisible spaces in construction and to draw straight lines for landscaping and masonry) as well as local wool, linen, cotton and felt.  

I’m intrigued by these two different senses of time: moments of crisis versus hours of craft/labor. Weaving and craft-time suggests a kind of optimism and belief in the future: the idea that someone will be here 100 years from now using a blanket someone wove in a future that becomes increasingly hard to imagine.

Ceramics + Events

COMMUNITY DINNERS AT THE BERKELEY ART CENTER

I created a dinnerware and design experience with food and wine collaborators.

Project

EMERGENCE/EMERGENCY

This installation was part of Intersections, a public art project on the Berkeley Paths on the eve of the Pandemic in 2020, organized and curated by Hadley Dynak @peak_86. 

In this temporary site-specific installation called “Emergence/Emergency,” I am thinking of the ways lines of public/private shift in times of crisis.  These gold/silver emergency blankets remind me of Japanese screens but in this installation, they blow in the breeze they lift and reveal private spaces.

The Berkeley paths were largely created as emergency egress, paths between the houses to allow people to escape their homes on foot. The paths are easements through private property.  I thought of the word “easement” too and the dual meanings of ease/comfort and the right to cross or otherwise use someone else’s land for a specified purpose.  The emergency blankets provide ease, comfort and warmth in times of crisis while in this installation also creating a screen between the public path and a private home.

Though it's tricky to talk about the upsides of emergencies and crisis, there is beauty is shedding the illusion of self-sufficiency and realizing the ways in which we are connected to each other.

Past exhibits

MM Clay - solo show
San Francisco
2021 

MATERIAL MATTERS - group show
Seager/Gray Gallery, Mill Valley
2020 

Erica Tanov - group show
A collaborative clothing collection and multimedia group show
Erica Tanov Marin, Berkeley and LA
2020

Farm House Urban, Mill Valley, solo show
Paintings and ceramics
2019

Kips Bay Decorator Show House
New York, New York
Collaboration with Topher Delaney (Delaney + Chin) Landscape Architect
2019

Gesture | Selected Works, group show
North Berkeley Investment Partners
2019

Art in April, solo show
St. Supery Winery
2017

Past projects

Jessica’s ceramic work has been featured at the SF Museum of Modern Art Store and The Gardener in Berkeley.