VERMONT
Penelope Jencks: Sculpture
BigTown Gallery • Rochester, VT • www.bigtowngallery.com
Penelope Jencks, Woman with Towel, terra cotta, 72 x 24 x 17", 1981. Photo: Janet Van Fleet. |
Visitors to this Penelope Jencks exhibition are greeted by Woman with Towel, a monumental terra-cotta Venus rising out of a beach towel and staring into the middle distance. Nearby are two additional pieces from Jencks’s early Beach Series I: Seated Woman and Sunbather. These three life-size, terra-cotta nudes are highly naturalistic, their smooth, clay skin eerily lifelike in color and texture.
Now, almost twenty-five years later, Jencks has returned to working in terra cotta, making small, beachside settings called Dunescapes that sit on pedestals or wall brackets. True to her ongoing engagement with the human form, most of these pieces feature dunes that suggest reclining figures. While in other work, in bronze and plaster the water is implied—as people disrobe, apparently to go swimming or sunbathing—in the Dunescapes, the water, waves, and sand of the ocean are actually represented. In one new piece, Back Shore, a tiny woman, less than half an inch high, sits on the sand. Houses and churches pop up like nipples out of the dunes of Ocean View.
Other recent pieces are Plaster Table I, II, and III. These tall, spindly tables have plastered legs, sides, and tops with rectangular cavities, into which the bases of eighteen-inch plaster nudes (standing, sitting, undressing, or walking), are fitted. Table I’s six people have pocked surfaces in a variety of subtle, washed colors, ranging from white to green-grey, yellowish, and a light terra cotta, like the different colors of sand, beach pebbles, or human skin. Each of these attenuated, self-absorbed characters seems to have independently traveled to this tabletop beach from different places, and each is engaged in his or her own solitary business.
There is something austere, chaste, and slightly melancholic about Penelope Jencks’s people—from the burnished terra cotta Beach Series’ women to the thin, sagging older bodies of many of her plaster and bronze pieces. They speak of the sadness of being in a body, how we are essentially alone attached to the dry land, not floating, intertwined in the ocean of oneness.
—Janet Van Fleet
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