Paloma Jimenez
Artist Profile: Paloma Jimenez
Deities of the Everyday
By Jillian Blackwell
What do keys, buttons, peanuts, rocks, and chewing gum have in common? You might find them on the roadside, and you might find them in the work of Paloma Jimenez. Jimenez is an artist who takes in the world, processes it, and reflects it back to us. She has been recreating bits of the world since she was a child growing up in Denver, “making small shoebox houses or miniature food out of polymer clay.” [1]
Paloma Jimenez, Gutter Guts, 2022, ceramic and glaze, 11.5 x 17 x 6.5 inches. Image courtesy of the artist.
Jimenez went on to explore photography in her undergraduate studies at Vassar College, where “Judy Linn encouraged [her] interest in the poetics of commonplace objects.” She deepened this investigation of the commonplace in her time at Parsons School of Design, where she received her MFA. There, the “philosophical impetus” of her work came into alignment with her use of materials. She has continued to explore this alignment as an artist in Denver, creating ceramic works out of her shared studio space at Urban Mud. Jimenez replicates objects in order “to grant prolonged attention to an overlooked aspect of our material world.” Her works combine these recreations of everyday items with more abstract objects.
By combining these parts, Jimenez explores formal artistic language, universal symbols, and systems of writing and language. Most pieces come together as a conglomeration of parts. Jimenez arranges these parts as a composer arranges a symphony: giving different elements moments to shine, and ultimately creating a harmonious and cohesive whole.
Paloma Jimenez, Junk Drawer Study, 2020, ceramic, glaze, and found ceramic fragments, 9 x 5 x 1 inches. Image courtesy of the artist.
Her work Junk Drawer Study blurs the line between abstract and representational art. A ceramic box with a few shelves houses a collection of objects, like a junk drawer but also like a shadow box for keepsakes. The artist makes these objects out of clay then glazes them in various hues from bright orange to matte beige. They look at once like rocks, discarded wads of gum, and lumps of clay.
Jimenez says, “the shifting between abstraction/representation is sort of a perceptual exercise, in the way that the objects in the background of a photograph blur into indistinguishable forms while the ones in the foreground remain identifiable.” By living in this liminal space, the viewer may draw meaning from either end of the spectrum, from abstraction to representation, and bounce around in between them. The ceramic material and glaze draw the objects toward the formal elements of texture, material, color, scale, and composition.
In amongst these ceramic lumps is a shard of mass-produced pottery, drawing the relation back towards real world objects by referencing domesticity and discarded things. The work contains a dichotomy—are the objects junk as implied by the title? Or are the pieces precious art objects? Jimenez literally and figuratively gives us a box to put these objects in and understand them. The objects sit on short shelves like letters on the lines of a piece of notebook paper.
Paloma Jimenez, Quantum Question. 2021, ceramic, glaze, and found ceramic fragments, 8.5 x 6.75 x 1.5 inches. Image courtesy of the artist.
Jimenez’s reference to writing gets even stronger with Quantum Question. A white slab of clay has mint green lines etched across its surface like lines of ruled paper. The artist places small objects in the scale of letters along those lines like a scattered poem. This visual poem ends at the bottom of the slab with two curling question marks, making light of our inability to read the lumps and broken tile pieces.
Paloma Jimenez, Sticks, Stones, 2018, ceramic, glaze, wood, sawdust, latex paint, and brass hardware, 46 x 18.5 x 18.5 inches. Image courtesy of the artist.
The series Ante-Alphabet further investigates language and writing. In Sticks, Stones from 2018, Jimenez puts a misshapen ceramic ampersand on a pedestal. Perhaps Jimenez wishes to highlight the role that the word/symbol plays in the phrase: connecting the words “sticks” and “stones” takes the reference away from twigs and pebbles to words of hurt.
As with all of her works, the things that are recognizable are also strange. The ampersand is gray and squat. The pedestal is skeletal and tenuous, covered in crusty white paint. A rock hangs from a pink chain hooked onto the side of the pedestal like a rabbit’s foot from a keychain.
The hand of the maker is always present in her imperfect forms, reminding us that her illusion of an object is really an allusion to an object. This allusion can hold many concepts—the beauty of commonplace things, the strangeness of commonplace things, and the materiality of commonplace things. “I do not choose to make exact replicas” explains Jimenez, “rather, I am interested in the gestural translation that happens between memory, eye, and hand.”
Paloma Jimenez, Percussion Instrument for a Broken Hand, 2019, stick, ceramic, underglaze, plaster, and found pottery fragments, 21 x 5.25 x 2 inches. Image courtesy of the artist.
Jimenez cites a passage from Collection of Sand by Italo Calvino as a basis for her investigation into language and writing:
“This was the country of clay: administrative documents, bills of sale, religious texts or those glorifying kings were engraved with the triangular point of a reed or quill on clay tablets which were then dried in the sun or baked. The surface and the instrument ensured that primitive pictograms quickly became simplified and stylized in the extreme. Pictographic signs (for a fish, a bird, a horse’s head) lost their curves since these did not come out well on clay; in this way the resemblance between the sign and the thing represented tended to disappear, the signs that dominated were those that could be drawn with a series of instant strokes of the quill.” [2]
From this passage she draws the idea: “language has always been rooted in materiality.” Springing from this point, her investigation branches in many directions. She explores the physical quality of letters and symbols, like the ampersand in Sticks, Stones. She investigates the gesture of writing, as in the lines, curlicues, and dots from Percussion Instrument for a Broken Hand. She thinks about the arrangement and composition of writing, as in Quantum Question.
Playing with language and writing as a basis for her ideas and titles is another main avenue of inquiry. Jimenez is “drawn to ‘readymade’ phrases or very common words because every person will bring their own personal narrative to it.” This includes the personal narrative that she brings to a phrase herself.
For instance, Jimenez uses peanuts over and over in her work. In explanation, she says, “peanuts are particularly important to me because one of my favorite phrases is ‘working for peanuts.’ I think that saying is an absurd visual when taken literally, but it also conveys a universal feeling of working hard for little monetary return.” The visual language of her sculptures displays this absurdity that she investigates, coupling it with the tenderness of the handmade. It is as if through touching and molding the clay, she is musing over a phrase, turning it over and over in her hands.
Paloma Jimenez, Moss, Very Tangled, 2019, plaster, comb, and watercolor, 4 x 3 x 2.5 inches. Image courtesy of the artist.
In her series Trash Fossils, Jimenez creates sculptures that riff on particular pieces of detritus. In Moss, Very Tangled, a snaggle-toothed comb stands up on a bright green pedestal. Her Golden Locks Bejeweled features a scrubber sponge bedazzled with semi-precious rocks. The trash is ornamented and put in a place of honor as an object of art.
Paloma Jimenez, Her Golden Locks Bejeweled, 2019, ball, sponge, and tumbled stones, 5.5 x 4 x 3 inches. Image courtesy of the artist.
“I find that I am drawn to the small things that people either lose or throw away,” says Jimenez, “they have served an ephemeral purpose, but are discarded to reenter a much longer geological time.” Jimenez enters these pieces of trash into another timeline—that of art history. She is mishmashing many ideas together: trash, preciousness, absurdity, and affection. Jimenez muses, “One of the most common comments I’ve had about my work is that people want to eat it. That may have to do with my color choices, but I do like that the comment involves ingesting, letting something roll around inside for a while.” With each artwork there is much to digest and much to savor.
Paloma Jimenez, Top of the Heap, 2022, ceramic and glaze, 11.5 x 8.5 x 8.5 inches. Image courtesy of the artist.
Paloma Jimenez approaches her sculptures like a writer approaches fiction. She most specifically and powerfully strikes upon the truth by telling a falsehood. Through her ceramic likenesses of commonplace objects, we learn more about the objects themselves. The ubiquity of these seemingly insignificant objects links us together as humans. “Mass produced goods have created an interesting sense of place in contemporary life,” muses Jimenez, “because you can go to any porch in a small American town and find the exact same plastic chairs. I find that surreal and somewhat comforting.”
Paloma Jimenez, Loam Below. 2021, ceramic and glaze, 19 x 9.5 x 3 inches. Image courtesy of the artist.
These everyday items are a record of our individual humanity—the gum we chew, the bottles we open, the clothes we wear. These objects also infiltrate our phrases and idioms. Jimenez shows how language can be a funhouse mirror, twisting the material world past a point of recognizability. Language and writing themselves are a collection of objects, whose form and substance can be manipulated. Jimenez toes the line between object and symbol, materiality and meaning. Her sculptures are allegories, hiding wisdom about the material world and our interaction with it.
Jillian Blackwell is an Editorial Coordinator at DARIA as well as an artist and art educator. She holds a BA in Fine Arts with a Concentration in Ceramics from the University of Pennsylvania. In the fall of 2022, she began the master’s degree Painting program at Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan.
[1] This quote and subsequent quotes come from my interview with Paloma Jimenez on March 29, 2022.
[2] Italo Calvino and Martin L. McLaughlin, Collection of Sand (Boston: Mariner Books, 2014).
