What the Mountain Gave Us: Hanna Pettyjohn’s Ordinary Sublime

“What does the mountain provide as a home, or as raw material?”

Hanna Pettyjohn (b. 1983, Manila, Philippines, lives and works in Dallas, USA) and her sisters grew up near the forested slopes of Mount Makiling, a dormant volcano at the southern edge of Laguna de Bay, the Philippines’ largest lake. Their parents, Jon and Tessy Pettyjohn, are transformative figures in Philippine ceramics: founders of one of the country’s first sustained professional schools for ceramics education, advocates for the use of local clay and glaze materials, and the first to build an anagama (wood-firing) kiln in the country. Over five decades, they have mentored and nurtured generations of ceramicists. Pettyjohn returns to this mountain as a site of origin – a caretaker whose clay-rich volcanic soil is harvested, thrown, and fired into the biomorphic vessels for which her parents are known.

“I’ve had this fantasy of documenting all of my parents’ works, which is impossible now – they’ve been prolific since the ’70s – all the while aware of the irony that their ceramics will definitely outlive my paintings.” Leaning into that paradox of material (im)permanence versus the stability of representation, Pettyjohn renders her parents’ floral-topped, fringed, and fluted vessels on an intimate painter’s scale yet enlarges them against the panorama of Laguna’s countryside.

This body of work departs from Reflections, in Situ (2025), where she “zoomed in” on her father’s ceramics, letting surrounding foliage overtake them. In A Mountain’s Hands, she “zooms out.” Now front and center, her parents’ humble ceramics tower above mountain peaks and reach from lush undergrowth past treelines to clouded horizons. Sari-sari (sundry) stores, residential subdivisions, warehouses, and other urban encroachments shrink to the margins. This inversion of scale – between the handheld and intimate and the sprawling and expansive – exalts the ceramics, in the artist’s words, to a “grand, imposing, and heroic” status.

Pettyjohn connects this recalibration of scale to sporting painters active in 19th-century Britain. Exemplified by artists such as Charles Turner and A.M. Gauci, these painters exaggerated the features of their prized animals to epic dimensions. Pigs, cattle, and sheep swell so large that they eclipse surrounding barnhouses, farmers, trees, and distant mountains. To Pettyjohn, the cow and the cup are “livestock.” Beyond object and animal, they allow a living for their keepers and makers. These earlier paintings – and her own – co-opt the visual grammar of advertising to assert expertise and legacy. “In their case, the land feeds the animals; with ceramics, it’s what the objects are made out of. Both embody pride in a lineage and the sustaining role of the land.”

Working now from Dallas, Pettyjohn often builds her compositions from satellite aerial maps and personal photographs. Across oceans, she relies on various fragments of found, virtual, and mediated images. She reconstructs a home thousands of miles away, a kind of uncanny alienation and distance that echoes how the idea of home itself morphs and reconstitutes through scraps of scattered memory, aging photographs, and remote technology. 

In composing these works, Pettyjohn looks to the traditions of her new home in the bucolic American South. She visits museums like the Cattle Raisers Museum in Fort Worth, Texas, which chronicles the idiosyncratic history of animal husbandry. Noting the particularities of each twist, point, and braid of barbed wire or the radial starbursts of boot-bound spurs, she observes: “Things taken out of their context and embedded into the environment to represent how they interact with – and in some ways form – the experience of a time and place.”  This museological impulse to elevate the mundane recalls what art historian Svetlana Alpers called the “museum effect”: turning lived material culture into objects of profound aesthetic contemplation. Pettyjohn achieves a comparable reordering of attention through the slow, deliberate act of painting – an act that relocates hierarchies and widens the span of our care and attention. 

  “I want to regard what the mountain gave us,” she reflects. Mount Makiling, in this sense, is not simply a lifeless place or insensate geological formation; it is animate and giving. Its elegant peaks and valleys have long been said to resemble the resting silhouette of Maria Makiling – Dayang Masalanta – a protective spirit, or diwata, sent by the creator Bathala to offer a celestial hand in the everyday toil of its people. In a similar play of mortal and divine, Pettyjohn paints her parents' ceramics as portraits. She reveres clay, form, vegetation, and industry – and their synchrony – melding them into a realm of the ordinary sublime. 

– Matthew Villar Miranda

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.