Bio

Jeanne Quinn creates theatrical installations that attempt to remind us that everything is ephemeral. She studied art history and baroque music performance at Oberlin College, and earned her M.F.A. in ceramics from the University of Washington. She has exhibited widely, including the Denver Art Museum, the Milwaukee Art Museum, the Kemper Museum for Contemporary Art, Gyeonggi International Ceramic Biennale (Korea), Foundation Bernadeaud (France), and Art Basel/Design Miami. She has been awarded residencies at the MacDowell Colony, the European Ceramic Work Centre, Zentrum für Keramik Berlin, and many others; she has also lectured widely at institutions such as UCLA, Columbia University, and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She is a professor and chair of the Department of Art and Art History at the University of Colorado.

Artist Statement

Ceramics is a very material material.  It is hard, permanent, fragile, heavy, soft, and plastic; it is contradictory.  Everyone knows its qualities; we use it when feeding and bathing ourselves, every day.  We have a bodily understanding of this material.  In its raw form, it is our landscape; refined, it fills our homes. I am interested in making work that plays with all of these qualities of ceramics, and that questions our perception of material and space.  In Everything Is Not As It Seems, I am preoccupied with domestic space.  When entering the installation, it appears chaotic—the suspended porcelain elements reference radial symmetry, but subvert it.  In the center of the room, however, everything snaps into place; the chaos becomes orderly as the bilateral symmetry of the room reveals itself, echoing the bilateral symmetry of the body. In A Thousand Tiny Deaths, I cast ceramic vessels and hang them from the ceiling.  A balloon is inflated inside each vessel and tied to a string, suspending the vessel for days or months. Ceramic relies on breath; the permanent relies on the ephemeral. With my work, I hope viewers question and newly observe the world.