janet abrams
santa fe, new mexico, usa
Janet Abrams, in PPE for ‘chasing’ bronze sculptures, Santa Fe, New Mexico.
Janet Abrams, The Unthought Known, 2019. Bronze. 5.5” x 11” x 14” Wax model taken from hand-built ceramic sculpture, 2019.
Janet Abrams, Kernel, 2018. Ceramic, urethane rubber, poplar, gold leaf. 9.25 H” x 12” L x 8.5” W
I lead a double life, as an artist, and a writer/editor. For me, the “Great Pause” has been no such thing. With in-person cultural events and international travel off-limits, the “stay at home” order actually helped me focus on completing two books I’d been working on for a while. Final corrections to the first, with a Barcelona publisher, were nailed two days before Spain went into lockdown. In early April, just as my second book was heading into production, Adil Writer called and together we hatched what would become Quartz Inversion (borrowing for its title one of my favorite ceramics terms, though my absolute favorite is “spodumene”—a mineral that sounds like a character from Blackadder). Since then, I’ve been busy building this website, thereby getting to know many ceramists whose work is new to me.
Ceramics was my entrée to sculpture more broadly defined, and in recent years, molten metal has cast its spell. Nowadays, a clay sculpture may be either an end in itself, or a first step on the way towards a bronze. In mid March, on my last visit to a crowded grocery store (before pan(dem)ic shopping, empty shelves, sanitized carts, taped “X” six-feet markers, and obligatory face masks), I bought a beautiful 25 pound jackfruit. Not to eat it, but to make art from it. Working in haste—before it started to rot—I captured its surface texture by making a brush-on rubber mold. Now I have a permanent negative cast of its fabulous polygonal skin, in which to pour wax for future bronze sculptures.
With quartzinversion.com launched, and both books off to their printers, I’m looking forward to an artist residency—in my own studio. I plan to make pieces I’ve been imagining during the pandemic. Especially about the experience of time: its malleability, eerie elasticity, and ultimately—for each one of us—its finite supply. And about the two other things the Coronavirus has rendered so fraught: breathing, and social proximity. It’s impossible not to be conscious of the connection between the inability to breathe caused by COVID-19, and George Floyd’s murder in my former city of residence, Minneapolis—the tragedy that sparked Uprising after three months of Lockdown.
Janet Abrams, Matins (A Natural History of Technology—III), 2019. Bronze, unique casts from branded American breakfast cereals, each 5” x 7” x 1”
during the lockdown, janeT abrams has been finishing two books, building this website, MAKING a rubber cast of a jackfruit in preparation for a new bronze…and yearning for a swim.
Janet Abrams, The Orange Blob, 2020. Brush-on rubber cast of 25lb jackfruit.
Plaster ‘mother mold’ formed over rubber cast.
The kiss: rubber negative meets jackfruit positive.
With a few taps of the hammer, the half shell comes off.
Rubber negative completely peeled off the original jackfruit, and turned inside out