About 2003.12

James Jansma (born 1958 ) received his BFA from the Kansas City Art Institute and his MFA from the New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University. He has taught the ceramics program at Princeton University since 1992. His approach to the medium is intensely rooted in the materials, and surfaces are not far removed from nature itself. Clay is actively applied in all its states and all at once. Liquid clay is poured over hand built substructures, powdered clay sifted atop, thick sludge further deposited and dry fragments are embedded into the overall complex surface. Glazing is an extension of the process. Numerous colors in repeated firings overlap, intermix and meld to intensify the textured form. Indeed the sculptures are suggestive of the elemental or the primordial. These new works, all of them deeply figurative, point to the temporality of the body - while the clay built up in layers, intimates a sense of geological time. Jansma's sculptures makes the connection of body and earth, surface and structure, form and meaning, a merging of the abstract and the concrete. Jansma was recently an invited international artist at the Anseong Ceramic Art Festival in South Korea and his work is in the Anseong Museums permanent collection.