Beauty and Repulsion, Decay and Renewal: Jessica Kreutter at Galveston Arts Center

Lindsey Wilson·
HoustonVisual Art
·

We may be made of star stuff, according to Carl Sagan, but the way Jessica Kreutter sees it we are all made of dirt.

“It starts with dirt. Dirt is you, will be you, and has been you,” the ceramicist says. “Growth is produced from detritus. As we die and disappear, the earth will continue to transform and grow.”

Kreutter’s sculptures—though she prefers to call them ceramic assemblages—literally take pieces of the earth (clay) and sometimes found objects to echo the natural cycle of decay and renewal. But for “Collapse,” her latest exhibition now running at the Galveston Arts Center through Feb. 16, 2025, Kreutter is revisiting, reviving, and reforming some of her earlier works into entirely new creations.

“Ceramics is, inherently, a lapse of control,” she says. “There’s always an unknown when you put it in the kiln. You know things will fall, but you won’t know how. It’s about seeing if transformation is possible.”

Disparate elements from Kreutter’s past work have been separated from their prior context, broken, merged, and reconfigured with other pieces though the firing and glazing process. Four of these “transformed” works will be displayed in the GAC’s Brown Foundation Gallery, all tied to the question, “after the collapse, what is possible?”

In 2016, Kreutter made a bed out of 80 individual, translucent sheets of porcelain, thin enough for light to shine through. Now she’s re-glazed and re-fired the sheets into eight stacks of “fabric” interspersed with her signature pink, blue, and green “debris.” Another work takes two to three large, half-sphere forms and fills them with rubble made of elements from past pieces. A third hangs “fungi shelves” on the wall, reminiscent of mushroom clusters naturally stair-stepping up a tree trunk.

The fourth gathers 22 open-vessel “hearts,” each with cracks and holes that reveal various shades of red glaze hiding inside. All are linked by a gold line. “Think of them as imperfect, broken hearts tied together,” Kreutter says. “Perhaps instead of rebuilding and repairing, there is the chance to transform. New gaps make room for variation and change. Loss and destruction become a pathway to somewhere new.”

Next door to the gallery, atop a bed of dirt in the GAC’s Vault, lies a work Kreutter made in 2023: Everywhere I am, a part of everything is a part of me. Colorful, mushroom-like ceramic spores sprout from delicately pale porcelain legs, hands, and feet, as if the earth is rising up to reclaim a full human body left to rot.

“That one just doesn’t feel right in a traditional white gallery space,” Kreutter says. Indeed, the installation debuted in an intentionally unimproved grain silo at Sculpture Month Houston where naturally occurring moisture caused real fungi to join the display.  “The Vault is dark and enclosed, tomb-like. That’s where it feels right,” she says.

The Denver-born Kreutter was schooled in Portland and Knoxville, and has served several artist residencies throughout the country, including at the Houston Center for Contemporary Craft. She now teaches ceramics and sculpture full-time at Houston Community College.

“I am interested in creating moments in which worlds and times flow together,” she says. “These moments suggest there is something more than what appears to be: a place between remembering and forgetting, where beauty and repulsion are intertwined. These points where boundaries are dissolved reveal different possibilities for how to imagine the world.”

Kreutter says that “Collapse” is “absolutely about the state of our world,” but notes that it’s vital to remember to find beauty in the destruction.

“The act of making something salvageable from pre-existing parts is a risk,” she says. “The new forms slump, flatten, re-fuse, and topple in firing. The process has been an act of play, experimentation, loss, and change. But letting go of past work lessens the weight of accumulation and brings change. Perhaps it is about breaking what exists to see what else is there. Or one last hurrah before throwing it in the bin. What I’ve tried to do is move through the experiment until I have faith in the process and can forget about the outcome.”

—LINDSEY WILSON

Lindsey Wilson

Lindsey Wilson is a Dallas-based arts writer and critic with a journalism master's from Syracuse University and an undying love for chips and salsa. When not at the theater (which is rare), she enjoys reading, playing with her dogs, and traveling. Photo by Jeffrey Hummel.