Jenni Ward
Meet the Artist
Jenni Ward is a ceramic sculptor and installation artist who finds her time spent connecting to her environment and exploring way above and way below sea level as an integral part of her process. With a particular interest in the patterns and structures of biological forms, she takes
inspiration from those spaces to create abstract interpretations of thoughtfully crafted ceramic sculptures.
Using clay as her primary medium, she builds in parts and assembles the pieces into ephemeral installations in nature, which are documented and then removed. These parts are later transformed for gallery installations and independent objects but creating ephemeral installations in nature is the heart of her art practice from which everything else evolves. Her work plays with the connectivity of the form to its environment finding a sense of place within the systems of nature. She has exhibited her work in museums, galleries, forests, deserts and even on a shipwreck under the Atlantic Ocean. Her work ties science, environmentalism and art together in the hopes of inspiring others to preserve, protect and enjoy our wild spaces.
Ward’s current body of work, an expansion on her Bone Series uses very thin, nearly translucent, porcelain clay to explore the unseen world of plankton; she uses this subject matter to create both individual objects and site-specific installations. Her interest in planktons began with microscopic images of radiolarians (single cell zooplankton) that have intricate and beautiful skeletal structures. She finds inspiration in the fact that even though they are too small to be seen with the naked eye, a bloom of plankton can be so large that it can be seen from space. In light of our changing climate, sharing the importance of these tiny and beautiful creatures seems vital to understanding how we are all connected.
Please join her at her brand new studio in the Las Playitas neighborhood to celebrate her very
first year participating in the Todos Santos Open Studios tour.