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ART & SCIENCE
Written by ROSEMARIE BUCHANAN : Portrait by MEGUMI SHAUNA ARAI
54
graymag . com
LIKE AN ALCHEMIST, Bellevue, Washington– based ceramicist Jolinda Linden is obsessed with experimentation. With a simple tweak in protocol—bumping up the heat in her kiln or adding powdered carbon to her material palette, for example—she can shift the shades or surfaces of her textural, iterative works. “My art’s like a scientific study,” she says. “It comes from a decade of figuring out, anticipating, and recording results.” Rigorous methods and self-imposed constraints (she uses just five tools and two colors, black and white) enable her to investigate and expand the limits of porcelain’s properties. Linden has had her hands in clay since she was five. “I made tile-like pieces as a kid,” she recalls. “I’ve always been intrigued by what you can evoke from a flat piece.” After earning a science degree, she first focused on crafting handmade giftware and then turned her attention exclusively to fine art, creating sculptural series that each test the potential of a single technique. This year’s series, “Reaction,” deploys a method she calls “smashing”: she melts glass onto cupped squares of porcelain in a superhot kiln, then rapidly cools it so the glass crackles. Other works in the series investigate what happens when natural materials such as copper are placed onto glass smashings in the kiln (answer: a deep aqua-blue pool at the center of each tile). “I push materials to their limit,” Linden says of her experimental process. “I’m seeing nature and its variances in each piece that survives, and in each piece that cracks or explodes.” h
ERIC B. PETERSON
LEFT: Artist Jolinda Linden sits amid pieces from her new “Reaction” series, in which glass is adhered to porcelain—resulting in highly textured sculptural works—via a technique she calls “smashing.”ABOVE: “Loss in Process,” 2016 (detail). BELOW: “Hot Spot,” 2016 (detail).