Jennifer Rochlin Biography

Born in 1968, Jennifer Rochlin grew up in Baltimore, Maryland and is currently based in Los Angeles, California. She received her MFA in painting from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1999. Inspired by a ceramic program that she was developing at a local school, she started experimenting with transposing her imagery from the canvas to the clay. Gradually Rochlin became more interested in the way that sculptures could work with narrative, so the vessels became the container of the story.Rochlin's pots are created by gradually building up coils of clay in a spiraling fashion, through which the marks of her hand are left imprinted on the surface of the clay. For this reason, her pots possess a distinctive form, with their motifs at times depicted in response to those forms, weaving a story in three-dimensional space. The lush flora and fauna of California is often taken up as a motif. Other motifs include pop-cultural references, decorative patterns, personal narratives and more recently, art-historical references such as Botticelli's 'The Birth of Venus', giving a new context to a world-famous artwork that has been prized for centuries.