I am making copies of my parent's work. They are imperfect records based on the thousands of photos that I have taken in and around their ceramics studio, where they also live, and where I grew up. For years, every time that I would return, this personal project to catalog these objects also documented the place itself (a home, studio, and place of production). I can’t help but think about how so many of these things are transient. Every time that I go home it feels different even though it stays the same.
Many of these images eventually became references for my paintings, flat versions of the round, dimensional originals. The original became ephemeral, keeping some aspects and shedding others. This new series of objects finds them regaining their dimensionality and mass as they are coiled, bisque fired, then painted so that the nuances of glaze, the drips and depth, are now applied by brush instead of flame. With each iteration, details are lost, reimagined or translated into something new, leaving an imperfect study of a record of objects both precious and lasting.
The common or shared materials in these new works are treated as references, not replicas. With the sculptures, paintings, and wooden pedestals are the pale white objects found in and around the workshop, like barrels, sacks of raw clay, leaves, and gas tanks for the kiln, in a smaller scale and pallor, blanched of all but the space they hold in the original context of that environment. These little faded shadows together form the vignette of home that cradles all the pieces created there.
To me, these works are sketches in clay, a version of ceramics interpreted through my lens of representational painting. In putting together this record, I’ve felt an appreciation for both the ability and the limitations of paint as I tried to convey the richness of glazes. In this way, the act of depicting something over and over again acts as a sort of meditation, where the portrayal refers not to the actual but becomes a visual descendent of an environment that is not the same as my memory of it, but it still rhymes.
About the Artist
About the Artists
Hanna Pettyjohn (b. 1983, Manila) lives and works in Dallas and Laguna. She graduated from the University of the Philippines Diliman, with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Painting. The daughter of pioneering contemporary Filipino ceramicists Jon and Tessy Pettyjohn, she combines sculptural installations with paintings in her explorations of identity. A Filipino-American with a transnational narrative, Hanna Pettyjohn possesses firsthand knowledge of the global diaspora. Autobiographical details and “fragments of memory” inform her work, which is tinged with both nostalgia and an acute awareness of life’s transience. Through her large-scale portraits and personal photographs-turned-tactile landscapes, she conveys the vague anxiety, loneliness, and alienation that afflict the uprooted.
In 2004, Pettyjohn won first prize at the 37th Shell National Students Art Competition. She received the Cultural Center of the Philippines’ 13 Artists Award in 2015. In addition to having exhibited in Manila, Miami, Taipei, Singapore, and Hong Kong, Pettyjohn’s works are also part of prestigious private collections across Southeast Asia.
Related Exhibitions
About the Artists
About the Artist
Hanna Pettyjohn (b. 1983, Manila) lives and works in Dallas and Laguna. She graduated from the University of the Philippines Diliman, with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Painting. The daughter of pioneering contemporary Filipino ceramicists Jon and Tessy Pettyjohn, she combines sculptural installations with paintings in her explorations of identity. A Filipino-American with a transnational narrative, Hanna Pettyjohn possesses firsthand knowledge of the global diaspora. Autobiographical details and “fragments of memory” inform her work, which is tinged with both nostalgia and an acute awareness of life’s transience. Through her large-scale portraits and personal photographs-turned-tactile landscapes, she conveys the vague anxiety, loneliness, and alienation that afflict the uprooted.
In 2004, Pettyjohn won first prize at the 37th Shell National Students Art Competition. She received the Cultural Center of the Philippines’ 13 Artists Award in 2015. In addition to having exhibited in Manila, Miami, Taipei, Singapore, and Hong Kong, Pettyjohn’s works are also part of prestigious private collections across Southeast Asia.
Related Exhibitions
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