Reviews

. . .  The organic, fluid symmetry and balance of Porcelain Curtain by Jeanne Quinn is a refreshing contrast to industrial repetition in aforementioned works.  Quinn’s works have a decorative quality; multiplicity, in her case, is attained through patterned symmetry.  Porcelain Curtain reminds one of home; the color behind her wall-mounted sculpture resembles a Victorian parlor.  Each piece of the curtain is carefully attached to the other like a chandelier but with the delicate texture of icing.

- excerpt from “Multiplicity: Contemporary Ceramic Sculpture,” by Amy V. Grimm.  Artl!es  Number 51, Houston, Texas, Summer 2006, pp. 107-108

. . . The Porcelain Curtain of Jeanne Quinn is linked to design by her use of decorative shapes that normally adorn china dinnerware, wallpaper and other domestic items.  In previous work, casts of everyday objects like balloons and cotton swabs become the basis for three-dimensional arabesques and decorative lines in space.  In Porcelain Curtain, Quinn uses a network of abstract, highly decorative forms linked by invisible thread to form a three-dimensional curtain that hangs before a painted Rorschach-like shadow on the wall.  Although the individual elements are decorative, the shapes are bloated and slightly distorted, verging on the grotesque.  Each form is left unglazed, giving them a chalky, bone-like quality that imbues the piece with Victorian eeriness.

- excerpt from “Multiplicity (NCECA Roundup Part III),” by Katherine Bovee.  PORT, www.portlandart.net, Portland, Oregon, April 19, 2006.

Excerpt from Exhibition Catalog

 Jeanne Quinn’s sculpture is, she says, “inherently multisensory” and memory based, assuming most viewers have some history of using ceramic objects in their past.  She plays on this notion by presenting familiar object in ceramic form, as she did in her site-specific installation of over 2,500 Q-tips (some real, some cast and glazed porcelain), entitled Perfect Lover, at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center in Sheboygan, WI, which she revisited with Suspended created specifically for Multiplicity at the Rubin Center.  The intimate act of utilizing cotton swabs bring us back to the sensitive body areas that are impacted by ceramics, in reality . . . or in fantasy (as in this sculpture by Quinn).  The insignificant size of an individual cotton swab, whether real or simulated, is blown up to comical proportions in this case: Perfect Lover comprised a symmetrical pattern over ten square feet of wall space when it was displayed.  And while the work made reference to such delicate precursors as lace or Victorian wallpaper, the overall effect was quite powerful.

Quinn’s sculpture encapsulates many of the impulses that we’ve described in this brief essay.  For while the artist blurs the boundaries between real and fake with the Q-tips themselves, Perfect Lover also denies the pejoratives that may be found in references to patterning, decoration, or diminutive scale.  She worked . . . to mass produce the multiple forms that make up this whole, and yet she still hand casts pieces for her installations as well.  Like so many of the artists in this exhibition, Quinn illustrates the contemporary ceramic artists’ disregard of the “either/or” of high art versus craft tradition.  To us, her work, and the work of the other seven artists in this exhibition, embody this burgeoning “freedom of the field,” making exhibitions like this one evidence of an exciting move forward in contemporary ceramics.

- from “Bigger, Better, More: Multiplicity in Context,” by Stephanie L. Taylor and Vincent Burke.  Multiplicity: Contemporary Ceramic Sculpture, published by the Stanlee and Gerald Rubin Center for the Visual Arts at the University of Texas at El Paso.  El Paso, Texas: 2006. pp. 30-31.