[This article originally appeared in the Fall 1998 issue of The Binnewater Tides, the journal of the Women’s Studio Workshop (http://www.wsworkshop.org/).]

Jeanne Jaffe, a Philadelphia based sculptor and teacher at University of the Arts, is in residence at Women’s Studio Workshop working on WSW’s first ARTFARM oriented outdoor sculpture.

ARTFARM, WSW’s expansion program established in 1996, is an idea to use the land for educational and aesthetic programming. We have now planted and harvested papermaking fibers at the nearby Phillies Bridge Farm, processed these fibers to sell to artists and schools and made paper from our flax and kenaf harvests while researching other fibers to be tried in the future. The hope is to eventually buy land for a small scale paper farm and to sponsor land-based sculpture projects.

Thanks to funding from the Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation (MAAF) WSW is able to sponsor a sculpture residency this year. The project was developed from MAAF's interest in placing artists in community settings to function as a catalyst for involving a broad base of community groups. To that end, WSW collaborated with SUNY New Paltz to involve students in varying aspects of the production and implementation of the project. Early in the project Jeanne presented her work and concept for the new piece to various groups of students in the Fine Arts and Humanities programs. From these presentations a core group of ten undergraduate and graduate students in ceramics, metals, and sculpture are working with Jeanne at the Binnewater Arts Center studios, learning how to scale up from her original models, as well as mouldmaking, and paper and wax casting. The final piece, tentatively titled “Field of Forms” will be a site specific sculpture of about 15 square feet, comprised of nearly 50 clay and metal forms. Each form is approximately 18 to 24 inches, and varies in height. Some of them might sit on the ground, and some will be above ground on poles or stands, “planted” in a configuration in an open area where they will be able to undulate in the wind. The public will be able to view the piece from a distance as well as walk through the “Field of Forms”.

This is Jeanne’s first outdoor installation, as well as her first attempt to create a piece that is site specific. The following is an excerpt from a conversation that Suzanne Taetzsch and Anita Wetzel had with Jeanne Jaffe about this residency at WSW and her experiences of working as a sculptor.

Suzanne: This being your first outdoor installation, in what ways are you anticipating the viewers’ experience to be different from seeing your work indoors?

Jeanne: First of all, they’ll come upon it in an unexpected way. They’re not entering a gallery or museum and that, in and of itself, is a different reaction. That’s the main difference. I think once that happens, some of the things that occur in my other work, will occur here.

ST: What are some of those things?

JJ: Curiosity, about what these forms are, and their relationship to each other. The work is not didactic. It draws people in to start piecing a puzzle together, but the puzzle is their own internal associations.

Anita: How do you feel about it, literally, being outdoors?

JJ: I like it. I’m hoping that it comes across as a dream with all these forms growing out of the ground.

ST: Sounds surreal.

JJ: Yeah. I’d say my work is a fusion of pop and surrealism. There’s a pop quality that a lot of surrealism doesn’t have. Kind of a comic book quality, because the shapes are pneumatic, as if they’ve been blown up and inflated somehow. They’re less realistic. There’s also an ancient pictographic reference to rebuses and hieroglyphics.

ST: How do these forms come to you?

JJ: Usually from working in clay. I start with a lump of clay and allow it to keep changing until it brings associations to me, and when there are three or four associations in a piece, I stop. There are some associations that are realistic, but I usually don’t start with a particular idea in mind.

ST: Do you do the work because you want to share your discoveries with other people, or is it the discoveries that drive you to do the work?

JJ: At this point, I’d say it’s almost fifty-fifty. But if I really had to choose, it would be more my own need to do it. The work is my way of thinking about things. And it’s a way of living more creatively. It’s a lot of hard work, and if it were only that, I don’t know that I’d choose to continue. I think if it were just for myself, I could find, at this age and point in my life, something a lot more physically enjoyable or less demanding to do. Actually, I think a lot about that. Why one continues, over a long period of time, to keep working.

ST: Did you always work three dimensionally?

JJ: I started out in printmaking. I think I started doing sculpture to try and give form to what I was trying to draw, to understand it, but then I ended up liking the slowness of sculpture. It was hard for me to process impulses so quickly, which was the case with drawing. Sculpture slowed me down.

ST: Are you aware of what people’s experience is when they view your sculpture, do they share it with you?

JJ: I get enough feedback that I have some sense of what people experience, and I guess I assume that part of what they experience is part of what I experience. And different people read them really differently. Some people tap in more to the darker side of the work, and some people tap more into the lighter side. And some people tap into both.

ST: And does that information influence you as you move forward in your work?

JJ: Yes. Especially if there are things I hear over and over that I don’t want in there, then I have to really think about it and shift it. I remember one time I had a show, and there was a talk about the show, and one man who came said "there is no room for the masculine here" and that really hit me.

ST: Did his remark give you permission to explore your masculine side?

JJ: Yes, because I thought he had a point. It hit a chord, and he was right about it. He hit on something that I couldn’t articulate to myself.

ST: You’ve written that you "work in an area where the distinction between things is not clear."

JJ: Right. But in terms of identity. That’s different than a formal definition. I think he was really pointing out the whole male sensibility, and I just was leaving it out. I remember one time I had a friend come into a show that was a four person show, and I had the Veil of Forms up. I also had a really enlarged version of some of the pieces that are in the Veil, including the big pacifier head, and she came up to me, not knowing it was mine, and she commented on how she found the work so disturbing. She didn’t like the forms blown up. She thought it was from some dumb male. She really didn’t like them. I found it very interesting. I like that reaction.

ST: So discomfort is one the experiences.

JJ: Yes. I enjoy, personally, a certain amount of being left slightly off center. I don’t like being hit over the head with anything, or told how I should feel or anything like that, but I enjoy a certain amount of disorientation. I like something to be evocative and provocative.

AW: As artists, we each have this vocabulary that grows and has more of a presence the longer you’ve done it. It seems like a nice time in your career to have this vocabulary and see it in the new context of an outdoor piece.

JJ: I feel that I am at a point where I would love to have a period of time with absolutely no obligations, so that I could actually see what new images would come up. Because commitments really keep you having to produce. Even this project. I’ve got a deadline, I’ve got to produce. Shows are the same way. It would make a big difference to have that kind of time, when who knows what would happen. I feel that I want things to shift, I need to shift, but I don’t have the time to do it.

ST: Why did you decide to take on this project at this time?

JJ: Two things. So far, all my work has been in only indoor materials, and I want to be able to work with materials that are outdoor. That’s a huge part of it. I want my work to be made out of materials that can stand up a long time and be able to be outside in the elements. The other thing is, I really want the challenge of having to get outside of my own psyche, at least a bit. So far everything has come from an internal source, totally and completely, and I want to start working with things around me a little bit more. And that’s a real dilemma, because I don’t want to be literal. That just isn’t interesting to me. The easiest way to work with the outside source is to just be illustrational. So, how do I do something that somehow has some reference to the outside, that differentiates it? That was a challenge to me. And I don’t think that will be solved in one piece. That’s going to be an ongoing issue that I’m going to start addressing and I feel this project is the beginning. Everything else has been so internal. And I want to move out in the world more, on all levels.

ST: Where do you get your inspiration?

JJ: It originates from what I’m thinking about and reading about. I get a lot of inspiration from reading.

ST: What do you read?

JJ: A lot of psychology, a lot of philosophy, and a lot of art theory. Those are the three things I love to read. For this piece I have been reading about the Mid Hudson region, about the history, geology, geography and populations.

AW: How do you relate to contemporary art theory?

JJ: Some theories lead to a very ironic and cynical point of view, which have consequences beyond the aesthetics of the work. I think it’s really interesting to try to understand why certain things are culturally important right now, even if I don’t agree with them. And what they imply. If you take an oppositional stance, why? What are the dangers, what are the things you object to in terms of its conclusion? And then what kind of culture do you have? I’m very interested in what art theory implies, not in what kind of work it produces. I object to certain things based on what the final implications are if you follow it through.

AW: Does this thought process somehow affect your imagery?

JJ: It does. You have to take into account positions other than your own and opposite of your own, to inform your own. I do not want to be reactive out of defensiveness. But I do want to understand the other positions and have really thought about them and see how I feel, in order to enter into the dialog on my own terms. I don’t want to just embrace a dialog that I don’t agree with, but I also don’t want to dismiss it because I don’t agree with it.

AW: How do you feel about what’s been written about your work?

JJ: I think some people understand it more than others, certainly, and sometimes I get ideas from what’s been written. Things I don’t think of, things I never would have considered. I find it very interesting. I usually see something I didn’t see or think about because it’s the other person’s subjectivity and associations. In a sense, it broadens my own perspective of the work. Maybe it gives me other options.

ST: Is there anything in your work that has not been written about?

JJ: Yes, the whole pre-verbal aspect. Either I’m not conveying it well enough, or it’s not something our culture taps into.

ST: When you say pre-verbal, do you just mean before we start talking?

JJ: Yes. We first get to know the world in visceral and physical ways, but I think we get acculturated pretty early. We have other states in our adult life that are close to the pre-verbal period. They’re different because we are adults, and because we have been differentiated, but there are certain experiences that tap into that same state in slightly different ways. To me, it’s similar to a mystical experience. Everything becomes pretty metaphorical. It’s the same thing with a religious experience. As artists, we have to be a little closer to that other state than we are to our normal rational state to do the work.

ST: Do you think that state is less normal?

JJ: I think it’s less normative. Not functional. In a way, those are states where people don’t function.

ST: Do you feel like you can move back and forth, tapping into these nonfunctional states and then return?

JJ: I try to. I like to. I’ve done a lot of reading about all kinds of psychological states and processes. I think people actually experience things the way the world tells them they can. We’re given permission to experience certain things and not to experience others. Certain things are more permissible than others, prescribed, and so one can enter them more easily. Certain things you can’t enter as easily.

AW: And yet, your work is about giving people that opening?

JJ: Yeah, I want them to enter, to experience it and feel permitted enough to do it. I think a lot of people get queasy about some of my work, because we assume that we outgrow these visceral sensations. But I think it probably is very, very, much still with us. The culture just says you’re past that now.