These are not your Grandmother’s porcelain collectibles.
Artist Jessica Harrison has created a new series of iconic porcelain figurines. Her new body of sculptural work features romanticized women in pastel ball gowns with tattoos covering their bodies. From neck to wrist, each woman is covered in ornate body artwork. Harrison has featured similar figurines in her work before, however, in a much more morbid light.
The Scotland-based artist researched “the relationship between interior and exterior spaces of the body” and recently completed practice-led PhD that was funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. Harrison acknowledges this connection in her artist statement:
Moving beyond a bi-directional model, Harrison proposes a multi-directional and pervasive model of skin as a space in which body and world mingle. Working with this moving space between artist/maker and viewer, she draws on the active body in both making and interpreting sculpture to unravel imaginative touch and proprioceptive sensation in sculptural practice. In this way, Harrison re-describes the body in sculpture through the skin, offering an alternative way of thinking about the body beyond a binary tradition of inside and outside.
