View Larger Image “Pennant for Jasper,” 4 feet 9 inches (1.45 meters) in height, earthenware, with steel, 1998.

June 8, 2007

Jeremy Jernegan: Surface and Form

by Glen R. Brown | Read Comments (0)

A certain degree of attention to the visual interplay between surface and three-dimensional form is crucial to the aesthetic success of a vessel. Consequently, ceramists—more than painters and perhaps even sculptors in other media—tend to be sensitive to this dynamic. The history of ceramics is replete with examples of visual complementariness and occasionally deliberate disharmony between these fundamental elements. In contrast to the visual, however, the conceptual relationship between surface and overall form has only been sporadically explored in the making of ceramic objects. Perhaps this is due to the fact that ceramic surfaces have more often been conceived as fields for ornament than as sites for other kinds of information. Even in contemporary ceramics, in which concepts have assumed an unprecedented importance, the potential for a conceptual relationship between surface treatment and three-dimensional form is often overlooked.

Among those contemporary works that do effectively exploit this potential can be numbered the large wall-mounted, ceramic-and-steel sculptures of Louisiana artist Jeremy Jernegan. In these complex works, form and surface engage in both visual interplay and conceptual dialog, yielding layers of meaning to the viewer who takes time to consider them on multiple levels. Distinctions of tone and hue between individual panels illusionistically reinforce perception of the actual planar shifts in the larger forms. The patterns of the surface imagery likewise interact visually with the overall forms, sometimes working with them and sometimes optically subverting them. Conceptually, the surface imagery generally functions rhetorically, eliciting from the forms a variety of figurative meanings. In some instances, discrepancies between the representational aspects of the surface imagery and those of the larger forms suggest conflicting entities or ideas.

Jernegan has been investigating the relationship between sculptural surface and form for some time. His most recent works are rooted in experiments carried out in a set of largely two-dimensional ceramic pieces created for a 1998 exhibition titled “Medusa’s Raft.” Inspired by the designs of maritime signal flags, he produced a series of large mono-printed earthenware slabs that might easily have been mistaken for paintings on thin panels. In order to emphasize their physicality, however, he framed them in steel, adding to them both a greater dimensionality and a literal opacity and weight. The results called to mind Jasper Johns’ famous collage-and-encaustic flags. The immediate outcome of this connection was an homage to Johns in a work titled “Pennant for Jasper.” The more profound consequence, however, was that Jernegan began to assign increasing importance to the relationship between surface image and the larger object of which it formed a part—a relationship that in Johns’ work generated a certain formal tension but which Jernegan would exploit for various purposes related to the conceptual content of his sculptures.

This focus led Jernegan to reconceive the steel components of his sculptures as frameworks rather than simple frames: inherent structures rather than mere boundaries. The ceramic slabs in his recent work, cut to the proper dimensions with a diamond saw, are still set within narrow steel enclosures. However, instead of lying parallel to the wall, they are projected at varying angles to one another by a system of steel struts and braces. In this manner, the steel in Jernegan’s work plays a fundamental role in overcoming some of the inherent material limitations of clay. “Obviously, one of the limitations of clay is that it has great compressive strength but poor tensile strength,” Jernegan observes. “If you want to work structurally with it, you have to find some way to cope with that. Steel, on the other hand, is a particularly effective material for structural integrity.”

In the past, Jernegan did not employ an overall glaze but rather chose to enhance sections of the dry surfaces of his slabs with thickly applied enamels. This embellishment is a prominent feature of a series of ceramic sculptures that he produced in 2002 following a month-long stay in Central America. A professor of ceramics at Tulane University in New Orleans, Jernegan collaborated on that occasion with several architects and other colleagues from his institution on a Fulbright-sponsored study of how architectural design, both historical and contemporary, has related to urban and civic planning in Panama. Impressed by the decaying grandeur of the French colonial buildings in the capital and the lushness of the tropical countryside, Jernegan abandoned his pretravel notions of focusing on the relationship between people and water, and turned his attention instead to the contrast between “the garish, crumbling urban environment of Panama City and the incredible richness of the forest. It was a fascinating and depressing contradiction.”

The sculptures that evolved from Jernegan’s stay in Central America include the relief series “Colonial Fans," in which monochrome imagery of tropical foliage spreads densely over the surfaces of three-dimensional fan-shaped forms. “I’m highly conscious of the relationship between the actual object, the sculpture that hangs on the wall and the images that it contains,” Jernegan explains. “The fan seemed an interesting icon of colonial life, a European domestic accommodation to the heat and humidity. It’s a gentile object and it translates well into planar form.” The fan, as a consequence, served as the starting point for the creation of a visual dynamic between form and surface, and a conceptual dialog between the colonial and the indigenous. Jernegan sees both a complementariness and an antagonism in this interaction, as well as a degree of synthesis. The historical imposition of European forms on the tropical forest and its inhabitants involved a certain amount of adaptation, and today the colonial and the indigenous are inextricable filaments of Panama’s past.

The relationship between the melancholy of the dilapidated 19th-century buildings of Panama City’s historical districts and the feelings of rejuvenation conveyed by the dense greenery of the natural landscape influenced another, even more inwardly oriented, sculpture to which Jernegan gave the title “Panama Roof Line”. Actually a reference to a bird’s-eye view of architecture rather than the horizon of a roof, the piece was inspired by a low pass over Panama City in a two-seater airplane that was carrying Jernegan back from a week spent with the Kuna Indian inhabitants of the San Blas Islands. In the sculpture, the crawling of the green enamel that emphasizes the joints of the “roof ” was encouraged as a reference to the peeling paint on the historical walls of the city. The high contrast photography of the foliage, as in the Colonial Fan works, was deliberately selected as consistent with the attempt “to express both the reality of the botanical lushness and the harsh, gritty artificiality of the contemporary urban environment,” Jernegan states.

The cultivation of visual and conceptual dialog between surface imagery and form has continued in Jernegan’s current works, which include the sculptures of the “Wave Train” series. Constituting a return to an earlier use of the metaphorical implications of maritime navigation for reflection on life decisions, the Wave Train sculptures share a common reference to water. The earliest works in the series consist of relatively few panels, each of which bears a black-slip silkscreened image of waves or wave patterns on sand. In “Small Craft Warning,” not only do the concave and convex elements of the overall form relate to the surface images through analogy to the undulating motion of waves, but the contour of the form also makes an obvious allusion to a folded paper boat: the small craft to which the sculpture’s title refers. Here the connection between surface imagery and overall form is a conceptual association that is almost metonymic: a boat and the water on which it sails being so closely related that one could effectively serve as a signifier of the other.

In the context of ceramics, the title Small Craft Warning is potentially read as a double entendre (especially given the fact that Jernegan’s sculptures, executed in a traditional craft medium, conceivably constitute a challenge to the notion that craft objects must always be made on an intimate scale). This witty tangent was, however, only a happy coincidence. Jernegan selected the title primarily to indicate his focus on the uncertainty that invariably envelops plans for the future. “I’m interested in the broad metaphor of traveling by water as a way of looking at our passage through life,” he explains. “The issues associated with journeying over an undifferentiated environment are particularly interesting. Difficulties of navigation can be compared to similar kinds of uncertainties that surround an individual’s choices in life.” The titles of most of the works in the Wave Train series—“Compass” and “Navigator,” for example—imply the imperative of determining one’s own line of travel despite these uncertainties.

Ultimately, most aspects of Jernegan’s works signify rhetorically in addition to representing more straightforwardly, or simply appealing to the eye aesthetically. In fact, the possibility of reading his sculptures on various levels and consequently encountering different meanings could actually be characterized as part of their content. The large relief sculpture “Pattern Recognition” perhaps comes closest to pressing this point. The variation in wave imagery on its many panels is a testament both to the diversity of appearances that water can assume and to the repetition that can be discerned if one pays close attention to details. Metaphorically, the work is linked to the problem of recognizing patterns in one’s own actions: of seeing the relationship between surface and form, the ostensibly superficial details and the larger whole of which they are a part. “It’s about being conscious of all the variations in the environment,” Jernegan asserts, “and seeing correlations there to something larger. The difficulty of this kind of orientation is obvious in the examples of people who make the same bad choices in their lives without ever seeing what they’re doing. Our own behavior can be both as transparent and as opaque as water.”

About the Author
Glen R. Brown is an associate professor of art history at Kansas State University in Manhattan, Kansas.