When you walk into Jessie Rose Vala’s show at Chefas Projects, you’ll quickly realize: These aren’t your average ceramics. Instead of raku fired pots or pastel hand-thrown vases, Vala’s work transforms clay into mission statements about the state of the world.
Combining sculptural ceramics with neon and metallics, Vala’s pieces feel chimeric, bringing in elements of earth, animal, and the human form to deliver a discourse on humanity’s disruption of the natural world with a side of myth-making. In short, it’s really fucking cool.
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“The show is called The Pollinators,” she explains from her studio in the woods outside Eugene. Much of the work draws from her interest in nature, and the pieces in the show reflect on the important work of the planet’s endangered pollinators—but there’s also a read of them as hybrid creatures with some aspects of the female face and form. “They’re kind of strange and a little monolithic,” Vala says. “They are kind of moth-like and plant-like and relate to endangered species. But they also have neon coming out of their eyes.”
Vala grew up with an appreciation for the lush greenery and towering trees of the Pacific Northwest. Her father was a landscape architect with an activist bent, taking her to protests seeking to protect old-growth forests. It’s clear this left an impact, as Vala’s work meditates on the natural world and what humans have done to it.
“I feel like there’s always a throughline in my work of being really concerned over our current system of capitalism, our extractive economy, and the degradation that happens to our planet and our bodies,” she explains. That throughline can lead from endangered orchids and insects to the treatment of women. “I’ve always been naturally more figurative in the work I make, and that’s always been female characters or female-like hybridity,” she says. “While I’m not academic, and I don’t know everything about eco-feminism, I think there are just core things about how we treat women and children that are shitty. How we treat other animals in our environment is shitty, and we are all caught up in this really poor way of being and thinking.”
That sense of loss and injustice courses through Vala’s work. “There’s so much grief in the world,” she says, “particularly with the loss of our ecologies. There is so much grief, and in our culture, I feel like there’s not that much space for it. With grief, the only way to get to the other side is to walk into it and fully be there. That’s when there can be a deepening and enriching growth.” So with The Pollinators, Vala has channeled that grief into and through her hands, creating gloriously hybrid shapes of plants, femme forms, and animal bodies that feel natural while looking wholly unnatural.
The result isn’t sorrowful, but somehow triumphant—and also kind of metal. “They are metal,” Vala says, laughing, “but the glazes also just have a lot of metallics in them.”
The Pollinators shows at Chefas Projects, 134 SE Taylor, Suite 203, through Sat April 4, more info.
