Jacquie Germanow

Artist's Statement
My work deals with the inner landscape of human emotion and intelligence. These pieces tap into the energy of change and transformation. The physicality of the forms, textures, and colors serve as geologic metaphors for spiritually or emotionally based perceptions and images. By aligning different materials (hence, different energies), they work to challenge me to a new level of awareness. Each pieces grows as I move with their story and their beauty. Eventually the energy channeling through me moves the disparate materials into a cohesive visual poem. By describing the essential nature of some of the materials I use, you can better grasp the thought process involved in the translation of an idea to material form. Fascinatingly, marble, shells & bone are all Calcium Carbonate.

Clay, with its earthy, terrestrial nature lends itself with gentle restraint and thoughtful coaxing and provoking to augur, pop, crack, and explode in a geologically characteristic way. The process of firing this plasticity and spontaneity into a rock hard state provides a further, apt, commutation of the material and the idea.

Bronze is akin to gold in color so it makes whatever it becomes more precious.

Wood is derivative of the earth and like bone is, as the artist uses it, a remnant of a living organism. Its grain color and texture evoke all kinds of visual associations before the artist cuts or chisels its body.

Copper conducts electric energy, and as it ages its surface transmutes from a warm, fiery color to lichen like palettes of blues and greens.

Iron, like clay, also comes to us through an arduous process of heating and cooling. When I use it intact as a tool or as a tool fragment, it belies a previous function relevant to the idea of my piece. Whether the piece is cast or retrieved, it weathers to rust. The metal that “bleeds” (rusts) is inherently female in nature. Iron also brings forth the male archetype of the blood-drenched warrior.

Glass hosts a fragile transparency that clouds, distorts, or clarifies. It is sensually fluid as water or as cold as ice. I use it mostly in cast forms that translate the form of other objects to light energy.

Stone, the quietest material, is the bone of the earth. Its calm cool presence speaks an ancient tongue that belies its fiery history of pressure, tension, and abrasion. Its creative potential echoes a feminine voice and energy.

Bone is the material of indestructibility, of immortality, of what cannot change, and a message of what remains from the living past. It is a material fraught with emotion from reliquaries of saints to the ancient cathedrals of Europe which replicated its color & texture for their ornate ceilings. Simply, it speaks the language of death. I see it more as a part of the language of resurrection and as an exquisite example of the scattered letters from a sacred force beyond our knowing.