Jenny Ibsen

JENNY IBSEN
2023-24 EMERGE AIR; ceramics

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Jenny Ibsen is the current RWS EMERGE Artist in Residence in Clay. Though she mostly works in clay Jenny has a background as a printmaker and hosts Fish Picnic, a series of community dinners that combine food and performance. She was a member at RWS in 2019 as a print associate and recently rejoined as a clay associate prior to being selected for the EMERGE program. 



Much of Jenny’s work is inspired by living in Maine. She loves it here and is grateful for the access to space and food and the ocean. She is also grateful to art institutions that are able to make their spaces available to artists through residencies. Jenny didn’t go to art school and wasn’t an art major but took a lot of art classes while earning her degree at Bowdoin College. She’s always been very crafty and started printmaking in 2015 and has kept with it pretty seriously. Jenny makes risograph prints using a machine that she describes as a combination of a large copy machine and a more-analog silkscreen. Risograph prints have an iconic look that uses a lot of overlapping fluorescent tones. 



Jenny continued making prints casually after graduation, working out of a studio in Fort Andross in Brunswick, Maine, hand inking and printing her wood and linocut prints. When she joined RWS she was happy to have access to a press bed, but

found that it didn’t make sense for her economically at the time and decided to continue making prints by hand. It was easy to reproduce an image and sold her prints through Instagram and at markets. Jenny eventually got tired of storing prints in flat files and started working in another medium. 

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Clay still feels very new to Jenny and she finds it exciting. She took her first clay class when she was living in Arizona during the pandemic, doing a work trade cleaning a studio and loading kilns and mixing glazes in exchange for throwing classes. She didn’t like throwing on the wheel and started hand building instead. Jenny joined Portland Pottery in February of 2022 after moving back to Maine and has seen her practice shift in the past year and a half. “I feel like inside I’m a printmaker, but printmaking is an interdisciplinary way of thinking,” she thinks about the layer building and components of adding and subtracting to create an image and the duplication of things as printmaking qualities that exist in both media. There’s a printmaking sensibility to Jenny’s clay work; in ceramics it’s building up color and layers and replicating forms multiple times.

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Jenny’s clay process is similar to relief carving--mapping the image using negative and positive spaces--and in clay the work has a functional aspect. She likes how it is more tactile and more durable. She uses terracotta, a low-fire clay because she learned ceramics using terracotta and appreciates how the clay body stays the same color when it's fired. Her work is color based and she appreciates the reliability. She also likes having dark orange as the neutral tone, “It’s interesting to think of a brown as how people would think of a white in a context larger than ceramics.” The color also serves as a contrast against the glaze colors she uses. 



Jenny is currently working through firing at different temperatures and glazing. Eventually, she would like to start making her own glazes because she wants more vibrant colors without having to use commercial clear glaze. She uses clear glaze selectively, leaving some parts with a matte finish. Glaze is a necessity in order for ceramics to be functional because it helps make them food safe. Clay can be porous, which is an opportunity for things like mold and bacteria to grow. Jenny also works at Onggi, a fermentation market in Portland; culturally there are ceramics that are unglazed, such as fermentation weights and vessels that Onggi uses for fermentation, where letting air in and out is beneficial for what they are trying to accomplish. 



The imagery in Jenny’s work is very playful and full of movement and life. Her carvings are a spontaneous process and each image is created on the vessel. She calls her first large vase series ‘Invasives’ that depict edible species invasive to Maine. One piece, called ‘Pest Picnic’ is full of slugs and Japanese Knotweed. In another, seagulls are stealing sandwiches. Her latest series is of bunnies inspired by the Lunar New Year being the year of the water rabbit. This is the first series Jenny has made that depicts a recurring animal. Chartreuse is a recurring color in her work and is another layer of unification between subject matter. The imagery in her prints was very different, often depicting a scene based on a full environment framed by hands doing something, “I like that motif of having a hand present in the work. I feel the hand is implied in the ceramics; you can see everything is very handmade.” The hands signify a moment of labor. Each of Jenny’s ceramic pieces is time intensive and one of a kind. In both mediums Jenny feels that art doesn’t need to be precious. 

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Her ceramic work has a direct connection to her love of food, sharing food and using it as a means to create community. Jenny started the meal ‘Fish Picnic’ when she received a residency through Gabriel Chalfin-Piney who had received a Kindling Fund last summer and regranted some of the money to Jenny to host a food event. She has since received the Kindling Fund herself (2023) and additional funding and has now hosted three Fish Picnics. They are all free public meals that are site specific and take place outdoors in Maine near the ocean. All of the food is plated directly onto the tablecloth that runs down a banquet-style table. Jenny has started opening the meal with a plating ceremony so that everyone gets to help plate the food, “It’s a nice way to prepare the meal together even though I’m preparing the food.” People feel it’s a creative release to see how the meal unfolds and it is an intentional way to meet new people. For Jenny, Fish Picnic is a vessel that can carry people and create a moment that’s shared. Fish Picnic has been so well received it has grown into something bigger than one person can manage. 



Jenny is currently seeking grant funding for Fish Picnic. For more information and to support the meals, contact her directly. 


Jenny will be at the RWS Holiday Market, December 8-10, 2023. Contact her through her website, jennyibsen.com or through Instagram @jennyib.

Images provided by Bret Woodard.