Jenny Andersen’s elegant wood fired ceramic vessels and sculptures evoke a feeling of mystery and the ancient past. Her ceramic chests are fully functional and as beautiful inside as outside.
Jenny has recently been awarded one of two Island Treasure awards by the Bainbridge Island Arts and Humanities Council to recognize outstanding contributions to the arts and humanities. Jenny’s award notes her contributions to ceramic artistry, her role as an arts educator and her work as coordinator of the Empty Bowls Project, for which local school children make bowls that are auctioned with a meal of bread and soup to raise funds for local charity. Through her art and her teaching, Jenny “has touched countless lives, inspiring people to live more creatively and artfully,” said the nomination on her behalf.
From an interview with Jenny Andersen, A Community’s Treasures by Rhonda Parks Manville, Bainbridge Island Review, January 5, 2005:
Jenny’s art – plump jars with elegant handles, intricate ceramic boxes, and horn-shaped cups configured with the lifelike faces of birds – is meant to move people, and to evoke a story, even if that story is different from what the artist intended. “If a piece can’t draw stories out of a person, it’s not a good piece. It should have some intrigue….Originality is not what I am after, but a quality that puts people in touch with the magnificence of human creativity.”
Jenny lives and works on Bainbridge Island, Washington.
