Jasmine Little’s art is in constant metamorphosis, shifting between mediums and techniques and as such, resisting categorization. With her practices including sculpting, drawing, and painting, her work is both intuitive and experimental; with Little’s personal history juxtaposed with the historical tradition prevalent in her work.
Some of her more dramatic work includes sculptures made to look like pillars or cylindrical stoneware vessels and carved with naive iconography. The decorative carving of these surfaces are dictated, in part, by the material itself as well as the firing technique. “The sculptures are clay,” explained Little in an interview with Art of Choice, “the recipe I worked out with my friend Stan Edmondson, it’s raw materials, sand, grog, sawdust, etc.”
Her unique formula of clay is hand-mixed in California, incorporating foreign substances that create a distinctive surface. Little then carves directly into this clay while it is still wet and inlays additional materials including porcelain, common gravel, and clinker bricks salvaged from a local Arts and Crafts-era house in Pasadena, CA.
“A lot of the materials are really specific to place,” she notes, “the gravel embedded in the surfaces is from the yard, the porcelain is one of his formulations, and the bricks are salvaged clinker bricks that are from the immediate area and reference the history of the arts and craft movement in Pasadena. I have been really enjoying having such tight parameters for my sculptures (they are essentially the same shape, all the same clay body, and I only use one glaze) it’s sort of this reduced down minimal format which can expand infinity from within.”
Born in Portsmouth, Virginia in 1984, Little studied at Copper Mountain College, Joshua Tree, CA, the University of California, Los Angeles, CA, and Adam State University, Alamosa, CO; and has exhibited internationally. But you can also follow her online, via Instagram.
