Needs More Wonder

Funds from the Puffin Foundation were used for materials to create a new body of work Needs More Wonder by Jenny Day. This includes the purchase of wood stretcher bars, Nova acrylic paint, 300 lbs of WH 8 New Mexico Clay, and various commercial glazes.

Needs More Wonder was shown at Alabama Contemporary in Mobile, Alabama from September 17 – December 31, 2021. Work included paintings ranging in size from 24 x 20 inches up to 90 x 90 inches. Ceramic sculptures varied in size from smaller pedestal mounted works to large multiple piece sculptures exhibited on the museum floor.

Artist Statement Needs More Wonder

Retreating from the stress and chaos of the last year, I created another landscape; populated by an army of friendly creatures.  Here the burdens of coronavirus, climate change, and political division are dismissed by hot pink kittens that arc gracefully through meter showers and owls that bury into beds of daffodils. In this place worry is edged out by the fantastic and mystical snails trail neon candy canes through the scorched earth. The apocalyptic is supplanted by the surreal and the allegorical.

Anxiety followed me. The escapist reflects and distorts its shadow world, the real, a funhouse mirror that names the traumas as it blows past them, slyly referential. The work suggests that magic is possible; while anchoring itself in the grotesque, inedible foods, a conglomeration of garbage.  A blissful, almost psychedelic, reverence for nature exists, but  the fantasy’s origins leach through in the details and distortions. The animals are often translucent, reflective.  Nature persists, proliferates, and transforms. Relentless flowers push up against the edges of paintings, attempting to smother and subsume, animals and people oblivious to any threat; the threat always present.