Colorado-based artist, Jasmine Little, shifts constantly between sculpting and painting, mixing together striking ceramic vessels with bright colored canvases. In her recent exhibition, cylindrical stoneware vessels are carved with iconography, reminiscent of ancient artifacts of a long-lost civilization.
Her inspiration for her creations varies from Flemish and Renaissance paintings and medieval illuminated manuscripts to Safavid period carpets, Japanese woodblock prints, Greek black-figure, and red-figure pottery.
“I used to make paintings that were really specific to place and time,” she told Art of Choice, explaining that now she’s working with more universal and basic themes that aren’t so much addressed for a specific audience. “I am very sentimental, but I want my work to be open and have more entry points and interpretations,” she adds. “That’s more what I am doing now in both my paintings and sculptures.”
Talking about how she balances between the two mediums she says: “For me, I get a bit stir crazy so bouncing between the two mediums helps break up my time. Typically I will work in one medium for a period of months and then switch, with that amount of time you can sort of get somewhere with something, and also get to the point where you are yearning for the other thing and start to build anticipation for the shift.”
“And then on the viewing end, I think paintings and sculptures operate really differently so it really opens things up for me,” she explains. “I can do things with a sculpture that may be really specifically about painting, but all the specificity of a 3-dimension object really alters the content (like its relationship to the viewer, body, the material of the clay itself, etc.) which is really exciting for me.”
Check out some of her fascinating work in the gallery below.
