Family Formations: The Art of Hanna and Jon Pettyjohn

All artists are uniquely themselves.  Yet they are also made through innumerable interactions and feelings of kinship with other artists.  Each maker locates their practice within a complicated lineage that reveals much about their particular aesthetic values and claims to meaning or function.  The art of Jon and Hanna Pettyjohn is no exception.  The sphere of influences impacting their individual creative lives includes, among other things: Japanese wood fired ceramics, the cast forms of the British artist Racheal Whiteread, 1950’s abstraction, and the long historical arcs of portrait and landscape painting.  Perhaps more important, especially for this collaborative exhibition, is the familial dynamic and influence between the artists; they are father and daughter to each other.  Untangling how the story of domestic familiarity impacts this collection of collaborative artworks, is one of the many charms of this exhibition.

To begin, both artists have a deep connection to the landscape of the Philippines.  In Jon’s case the land around his and his artist wife Tessy’s home and studio at the base of Mount Makiling is essential to understanding his sense of artmaking defined by a distinguishing materiality; his ethos is to craft forms that retain a kind of embodied fingerprint born from his sensitivities to locale.  Jon shapes ceramic objects that speak of and from a long tradition, all the while defining something peculiarly his own.  This emphasis on transforming and honoring raw materials uncovered often near his studio compound, helps define the spirit to much of Jon’s well-known objects and utilitarian vessels.  Hanna is also intent on thinking about how material specificity impacts the meanings of her art making. In her paintings and sculptures, she draws connections between her personal history growing up within a ceramic-making family and the art ingredients she repeatedly experimented with over her lifetime. Hanna habitually delineates a relationship between the striations of mud, clay, and dirt seen in the landscape of her birth with the layered qualities of garments or with genealogical portraits of herself and her family. In this framing we can see how both Jon and Hanna make artworks that are a type of broadly defined self-portrait, created through a handling of story, place, art historical precedent, and a reverence for the characteristic qualities of materials pulled from the earth.

For this exceptional exhibition father and daughter have decided to work together in a kind of call and response, making objects that emerge from their spoken and unspoken communication.  In short, Jon first shapes and outlines the boundaries of clay forms, that Hanna then paints with calligraphic brushed colors and imagery.  The vessels speak by themselves but are complicated by these additional renderings that both support the rounded forms, but also portray fragmentary scenes built from the discards or remnants of failed firings. Representation and time are commingled—notice how a “flawed” vessel is linked with one that is deemed acceptable, complete, and inviolate. 

These collaboratively shaped and painted jars are paired with a handful of large paintings that reveal the initial impulse for the show. In these densely painted vignettes Hanna has depicted scenes from around the home and studio of the family.  We see how Jon and Tessy’s penchant for accumulating vessels in different stages of completion throughout the property must have imprinted a kind of wonder in the mind of young Hanna.  These unused pieces are scattered not as unwanted trash but are left to perhaps later be reinvigorated into newly made work or for freshly configured exhibitions. As such, these snapshot paintings, pictorialized through Hanna’s adult eyes, have taken on a life of their own, and for this show serve as emblematic scenes where the less-than-perfect ceramics live on as part of the garden or as modest arrangements showing a faulty but ever-changing grace. 

Taken together, the two large paintings combine with Jon and Hanna’s work as a team to narrate a story about the travails of form making—the show seems to speak about the ups and downs of the artist life through these masterful creations that are newly elegant, yet about seemingly damaged or deficient forms. Perhaps beyond the family conversations and memories that these artworks elicit, something metaphorical about the nature of our lives is also tangibly present—how we are each broken in our own ways, and through a dogged persistence, transformed and valued anew for the reality of what we are, as opposed to an ideal never to be reached.

In our correspondences about the exhibition, Jon and Hanna described their collaboration as coming from the history of Oribe pottery “…which combines (often green) glazed and unglazed surfaces. The unglazed surfaces are usually decorated with an underglaze painting, the glazed surfaces are spontaneous and often cover part of the underglaze. Historically, the underpaintings were often patterns or scenes from nature”.  This emphasis on the ingredients of the natural world meeting depictions of the natural world, in this case described as broken ceramic forms, stacked or left to be reincorporated back into the soil, or used in future artworks, seems meaningful for how we might think about the worked clay and the brushed painting.  The objects they have created have a purposeful utility and also a powerful symbolic suggestion of fragility and also endurance.  Beyond this reading there also seems to be a poetic suggestion about the gap between a perfect natural abundance sitting side-by-side with our sometimes beautiful, sometimes humble contributions as artists.

Look for instance at but one outstanding example entitled “Production/Pre I”, where a finely shaped pot is deftly painted with a tumbling array of smaller vessels and fired bits and bobs, like a collection of cracked memories haphazardly stored as events within the skin and bones of our being.  Each vessel created for this stunning show speaks eloquently about the land, family, and material substance that Jon and Hanna’s lives are rooted within.  Perhaps with some touch of magic, the works also speak to our own flawed beauty and our particular feelings of rootedness to a place, a moment in time, or our individually distinct and imperfect family histories.           

– Matthew Bourbon

Jon Pettyjohn (b.1950, Okinawa, Japan), together with wife Tessy, is considered one of the pioneers of contemporary Philippine ceramics. For the past 38 years he has worked passionately in the realm of high fire Asian style ceramics. Although mostly functional he also sometimes explores the boundaries between the utilitarian and the sculptural, which he feels strongly, are of equal importance. The exploration for and use indigenous natural materials like clay, stones and ashes for ceramics are one of his major focus. Since 2000 he has concentrated on woodfiring using Anagamas (cave kilns) known for their rich natural glaze affects.

From a handful of contemporary potters in the 1970’s the ceramic scene has grown exponentially in part from the Pettyjohn’s influence on a new generation of clay artists many of whom have been their
apprentices or students.

Hanna Pettyjohn (b. 1983, Manila, Philippines; lives and works in Dallas, USA) is a Filipino-American artist whose practice combines sculptural installations with paintings in an exploration of identity and
transnational narratives. Tinged with both nostalgia and an acute awareness of life’s transience, Pettyjohn’s practice is informed by fragments of memory, autobiographical details, and firsthand knowledge of the global diaspora. Through her large-scale portraits and personal photographs turned-tactile landscapes, she conveys the vague anxiety and alienation that afflict the uprooted.

Pettyjohn is the daughter of pioneering contemporary Filipino ceramicists Jon and Tessy Pettyjohn, and she has exhibited in Manila, Miami, Taipei, Singapore, and Hong Kong. Her work is also held in numerous private collections in Southeast Asia. She graduated from the University of the Philippines Diliman, with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Painting. In 2004, Pettyjohn won first prize at the 37th Shell National Students Art Competition. She received the Cultural Center of the Philippines’ Thirteen Artists Award in 2015.

Matthew Bourbon is an artist, art critic, and Professor of Art at the University of North Texas' College of Visual Arts and Design.