By Jessica King
Staff Writer

Photos by Jessica King

With clay slabs rolled out before her waiting to be shaped, and wire to the side waiting to connect all of the pieces together, local ceramic artist, Jessica Sanders, only sees unlimited potential.
“I don’t really plan the piece before I start, I just attach them together and let it happen as I go. I let the process inform me,” Sanders said.
Sanders received her Master of Fine Arts from the University of Texas at Tyler in May 2020, her artwork was put on display at the Foundry Coffee House on Jan. 10. According to Sanders, her friend, Joanna Gifford, who was working with the art gallery at the Foundry, offered her a show after her thesis exhibition, was postponed due to the COVID-19 shutdown and was moved to an online show.
“I was very excited to have my work shown there. Their gallery is such a nice space. I’m a big fan of the style of gallery called the ‘white cube’ and [the Foundry’s gallery] is a pretty good example of it. Also, the Foundry is pretty popular so there’s usually a lot of people there,” Sanders said.
According to foundry-coffee.com, Sanders’ work is made up of ceramic pieces that are wired together to create flexible sculptures. In her statement on foundry-coffee.com, Sanders describes her display as, “A building of shape.” Further, she explains that shape stacks and interacts with itself, and how it can be pushed beyond that.
“A square can be stacked or tessellated infinitely, but the perception of it being stacked is changed when it becomes three-dimensional, and then when it has been folded or bunched up or layered. Color, texture, and surface patterns help to break up the repetition of the shape being tessellated. It stops being just a pattern and becomes an object,” according to her statement on foundry-coffee.com.
For the construction of her work, Sanders cuts clay pieces out of the rolled-out slab, fires them, and then attaches them with wire. But clay and ceramics are not the only medium this artist uses to create. She has used an array of mixed media in her art including painting and printmaking.
Sanders’ artistic abilities, she said, came from her family.
“I came from a pretty artistic family. My mother was a drama teacher and my dad has been drawing and doing creative things all my life,” Sanders said. “Growing up, my dad would take my brother and myself to the zoo and we would sketch animals and things like that. My parents definitely fostered my creativity.”
But it wasn’t until she took an art appreciation class at Tyler Junior College that she realized she didn’t just want to take art classes for fun; she wanted to pursue a career as an artist. Her work with clay and ceramics, however, was not inspired until later in her college career.
“I definitely did not start out in clay, but once I figured out how to use it to best fit my purposes, I fell in love. What you can do with clay is unlimited, and the ceramic community is so tight-knit and I just love that,” Sanders said.
Sanders is a part of a four-woman ceramic art collective called The Art School Girls, foundry-coffee.com said. She also helped found and is on the leadership team for ETX Creatives, a nonprofit that helps bring opportunities to East Texas artists.
According to foundry-coffee.com, Sanders also has exhibited at many shows, including The National Council on Education for the Ceramic Arts Student Juried Show in Richmond, Virginia, and “Lush,” a juried show in Tequesta, Florida.
To learn more about Sanders or her art, visit her Instagram art page @jessicalsandersart.