“Relationships and interdependence are building blocks for Jennifer Brazelton’s work. She draws inspiration from visual patterns as apparently unlike as San Francisco bus lines, viral colony growth patterns, and machine gears. Order and place in these structures are emphasized like links in any living chain. Organic forms of expansion, like molds, dictate the conversation of separate elements into the dominant structure. Patterns of the urban environment contribute to her organizing principles of visual composition. The mechanical formations hide the hand of the artist. What is revealed is the mind of the artist.
Brazelton makes intricately constructed ceramic forms which re-present and abstract our daily environment. She uses extrusion and press molds to generate mass-produced parts, then arranges the elements in layered, formal relationships. Brazelton’s work can be simultaneously apprehended as convoluted highway ramps and as Petri dishes. Our human point of view oscillates between the macro and the micro. Are we in it or outside it? Governed by it or controlling it? The world connate refers to parts that have grown to form a single structure. Such parts may be dissimilar or even forced together.
Brazelton’s process, like the work she creates, is an intricate layering of intimate and monumental structure, fused into a new entity. “ Excerpt from Jennifer Brazelton: Essential Structures by Susannah Israel
Brazelton lives in San Francisco with her husband and has her studio at Dome Studios in Oakland, CA. She teaches at California State University East Bay, Merritt College, Skyline College, National Institute for Artists with Disabilities, and the Richmond Art Center. Her work is represented in the Lark Books publication “500 Raku Pieces”, Politics of Perception: Post-Foucauldian Ceramics, in a public art installation in Paso de los Libres, Argentina, and by Xanadu Gallery in Scottsdale, AZ.