Contemporary Art in Context: Jennifer Halli

Jennifer Halli is a multidisciplinary artist who specializes in ceramics and printmaking, creating abstract works that investigate place and material while exploring themes of travel, growth, and loss. She is conscious of ecosystems and creates biologically resonant sculptures, with one piece informing the next and growing out of the previous; in essence, representing cycles, generations, and replication. In creating various iterations of the same natural element, she seeks beauty found in the basic building blocks of nature.

Time and Place
Halli’s works are made from clay, paper, ink, sugar, metal, and fiber. As a frequent traveler from the US to New Zealand and other parts of the world, Halli considers materials and time to be key aspects of her work, as they are informed by her experiences. She also references historical uses of nature, wherein her iconography assumes the form of a grid, representing boundaries, continuity, and repetition.

Such is the case with her time-based sculpture Clepsydra, composed of 256 cups cast from sugar and wax, floating on backlit water and grid-like in arrangement. The piece symbolizes the oldest time-keeping instrument, the water clock, or clepsydra. As time passes, the water makes its way through the wax to alter the sugar day by day.

Exploring perceptions of place and otherness, With Feet Opposite, an installation in New Bedford, Massachusetts, typifies Halli’s collagraph prints made with natural materials and clay, representing places that are directly opposite each other on the globe. The title is inspired by a term commonly used in New Zealand and Australia to refer to the northern hemisphere.

Halli is also an innovative printmaker. Kaydee (2020) comes from her artist-in-residency at Driving Creek Railway and Pottery in Coromandel, Aotearoa New Zealand. As a tribute to her mentor there, Barry Brickell (1935–2016), she printed Kaydee on Thai kozo paper using found wood with pigment made of raw and fired clay and wood ash. The title refers to the wire her mentor would use to repair his plastic Chinese sandals. Halli currently uses sand and clay as ink, which she gathers locally from Kāwhia Ngāmotu, New Zealand.

Art History: Ceramics as Fine Art
The perception of ceramics as fine art rather than merely utilitarian objects evolved in both the East and West from the late 1800s to the mid-1950s. It is not difficult to discover instances before that when ceramics did indeed exist as fine art, often in combination with other objects. Examples include the army of ceramic soldier figures in the tomb of Emperor Shi Huangdi (ca. 221–210 BCE), the haniwa tomb guardian figures of the Japanese Kofun period (ca. 220–552 CE), and the Mayan tomb figures of elite people from Jaina Island, Mexico, from the Classic Period (ca. 250–900 CE).

Examples of contemporary uses of ceramics in fine art can be seen in the found-object assemblages of Betye Saar (b. 1926) and the large-scale installations of Rachel Harrison (b. 1966). These artists not only present ceramics as fine art, but like Halli, their works comment on personal or collective experiences, transitions, and time.

About the Artist
Jennifer Halli was raised in South Carolina. She received a BA in art education from East Tennessee State University (1994) in Johnson City and spent many years earning a living as a self-taught metalsmith while teaching art in primary schools. She began working in clay after moving to New Zealand, apprenticing to Robert Barron (b. 1957) of Gooseneck Pottery at Kardella, Victoria, Australia, a facility dedicated to traditional woodfiring techniques. She returned to the United States and received an MFA (2019) in Artisanry at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. On her return to New Zealand in 2022, she established MIGHT COULD, an experimental art project space in Ngāmotu, New Plymouth, Aotearoa, where she currently lives and works.

ARTIST Q&A
What are some of the biggest influences on your work?
JH: There are three main influences: the number of times Iʼve moved house (or all the places I have lived), growing up Catholic, and the loss of my sister.

Having moved house over forty times from the age of eighteen until now is something I often think about, specifically the move from the USA to New Zealand (which nobody knew where it was at the time). The story behind February (spacestudiogallery.co.nz/work/jennifer-halli-february/) is that I was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in the middle of a blizzard; now I enjoy that February birthday in the middle of summer in New Zealand. I can never be in both places at once, so I use the color blue to represent, in the words of Rebecca Solnit, “the color of where you can never go. For the blue is not in the place those miles away at the horizon, but in the atmospheric distance between you and the mountains.” Regardless of the distance between New Plymouth, New Zealand (where I live now), and South Carolina (where I grew up), we share the same sea and sky.

Growing up Catholic taught me there is symbolism and meaning in everything. The idea I can use the color blue to represent so many thoughts and ideas freed me from being too literal.

Other than natural materials, what do your prints share in common with your clay pieces?
JH: Multiples/repetition. I was a wood-firing potter for years, making functional bowls and cups and firing kilns by stoking them with wood for up to a week straight. Then I earned an MFA in Artisanry (Ceramics) from the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth in 2019. All the equipment and art students were in an old department store called the Star Store in New Bedford. It was brilliant. My ceramic studio was on the fourth floor, and I would sneak down to the third floor to the printmaking studio to hide from ceramics. Here, I started making small, intimate, handheld (bowl-size) collagraph plates, something I could tuck in my pocket and take home. I still do that today. I pull these small prints on a big press and then glue them all together; I have to keep reminding myself I can work big now. This repetitive process of pulling prints is similar to throwing lines of bowls.

Another mutual characteristic is the pigment I use. While hiding in that printmaking studio, I realized I could use raw materials from the ceramics studio in my ink. Today I use terra-cotta, earth pigment, ash, and black iron sand. Iron sand makes up the beaches of New Zealand’s west coast—the finest particles are shiny and magnetic. These particles add texture or color, and I use blue earth pigment to emulate a Korean celadon glaze, which is a bit thick and inky, yet translucent.

Is decay an important element in your art?
JH: Decay was important when I was working toward my MFA. Overnight, I went from micro to macro in scale, from working on static sculptures in my studio to making works that would change and interact with the landscape I was watching outside my window. I let go of preciousness by installing paper and raw clay outdoors (especially in Massachusetts), and watched the effects of rain, snow, wind, sunshine, tides, and people. I made With Feet Opposite thinking rain would change the work, so [I] spent weeks experimenting with different printing techniques using charcoal, watercolor, water-based, and oil-based ink. In the middle of the night, after I installed it, a massive wind gust came through and wrenched it in half! I had no idea this happened; I trotted down to visit it the next morning and was in disbelief. I didn’t know whether to cry or laugh. We always have something to learn about materials and ourselves. It ended up being a more on-point metaphor than I could have dreamt.

Can you tell us about any recent or upcoming projects?
JH: It started as a pop-up, but I’ve been running an art project space for the past two years called MIGHT COULD. During that time, I held art exhibitions, grew a lawn over six weeks, and created multiple collaborative projects with another artist, including printmaking with chickens, lighting hand-pulled linocut valentines on fire and extinguishing them by running them through the press (à la John Cage), and working with over one hundred community members to create a twenty-nine-foot-high sculpture. MIGHT COULD was a great excuse to get a large disco ball, so I hosted bands, DJs, and experimental sound. MIGHT COULD will come to an end soon, but it caused me to gain a lot of courage and create a brand that can pop up anywhere.