My work is intuitive and very much influenced by the Surrealistic practice of automation. I don’t have an image in mind before I draw, I just let the lines dictate the next movement. I began drawing after taking ceramic courses, and believe the repetition in my patterns may be a subconscious result of the practices utilized in ceramics. The way the wheel spins and spins and how the pinching goes round and round when creating vessels stirred my desire to draw something over and over.
Oddly enough, my drawings have in turn influenced my later ceramic work. I have been searching for ways to incorporate my drawings into clay. In my attempts to translate my drawings to clay, I’ve drawn directly on forms: scratching or actually drawing with clay materials. I’ve used liquid clay to draw my delicate designs and when the “drawing” inevitably brakes, I’ve created a conglomerate sculpture from the broken patterns.
My drawings and ceramic work help me cope with a deep-set distrust in words and tangible realities. I have come to a conclusion that words cannot convey my emotions or thoughts, and choose to use these patterns and lines to obscure any form from emerging. I see it as a continuous seeping entity that has no end.
All of the titles I have chosen are taken from Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close and Nicole Krauss’ The History of Love. These bodies of work accurately describe the tensions I feel between my emotion, words and the external world.
– Jennifer Lawrence
“All the Lives I’m Not Living” 2012
“taking the world into me,” porcelain, glaze, nichrome wire, knitted thread, 2012
“Highland inquiry”. unfired porcelain and black slip. 2012
“Collecting the World in Small Handfuls,” india ink, watercolor on printmaking paper. 2013.
“The Poverty of Never Being Heard,” india ink on paper. 2013.
“leaning to feel less,” printmaking paper, india ink, watercolor. 2013.
“The Richness of Silence,” india ink on paper. 2013.
“everything to say to each other, but no ways to say it” pen on paper material. 2012
“doing something you do not understand” pen on paper. 2013
Jennifer Lawrence was born and raised in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. She received a dual degree in Art History and History with a minor in Ceramics from LSU. Her work can be found here. For inquiries about her work, email jlawr11@tigers.lsu.edu.
smoking glue gun 