Foremost, her ceramics are narrative, though not always in a linear fashion. She resists easy categorization and creates work that, to some degree, resists easy viewing. She is not one who readily invites strangers into her world or one who necessarily invites conjecture about her artwork. It is possible to see the influence of the Funk movement emerge in Brandl’s work as an expression of her desire for calculated ambiguity, random absurdity, and even casual vulgarity or a certain coarseness.īrandl’s artwork is deceptively complex, but then so is she. Brandl’s connection to Funk, especially as a ceramic movement, has other corollaries. Competently fluent in art and ceramics history, she points to her desire for social agency in her work akin to how Funk artists rejected the empty nonobjectivity of Abstract Expressionism in favor of engaged content. Much has been made of Brandl’s life story and personal history, but she, in a phone interview, indicates that she hopes the viewer will look past these details, look past assumptions about her gender and judgments regarding her physical appearance, and read the work as issue-based social and political statements. Instead, she takes on broader social and political issues-a direction adopted, perhaps, from one of her stated mentors and longstanding friend, Richard Notkin, with whom she has collaborated. Throughout the course of her career, Brandl has increasingly resisted making work that reflects her personal biography. Now, in a new studio, she is trying to find firm footing to begin her practice afresh.

However, as her residency concluded, she decided to stay in Helena, Montana, recognizing that she was part of a community well known for being supportive of ceramic artists. Brandl has been peripatetic all her adult life. Major transitions in the life of an artist are already fraught, complicated by the need to maintain a regular practice with the complexity of building or inhabiting new studio spaces and routines. Like so many artists, her studio practice has been disrupted by the pandemic. Her work arguably is about how to manage the flow of anxiety-opening the floodgate of personal tragedy, COVID-19 angst, and socially engaged practice (a form of anxiety) just enough to competently engage and deal with each issue without allowing it to be entirely overwhelming.īrandl completed her residency at the Archie Bray Foundation for the Ceramic Arts last year just as the COVID-19 pandemic reached peak momentum. Jessica Brandl is seized by certain anxieties, but then, she jokes, such is life as an artist.

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The untelling