Isys Hennigar: Selected works, 2020-2024
Isys Hennigar’s work invokes real and reimagined ecological encounters that underscore transformation, hybridity, and play as tools of renewal. Braiding forms and imagery from agriculture, mythology, and medicine, her work considers systems of sustenance and healing and the cultural and ecological legacies of land cultivation. Grounded in the landscape of the southeastern United States— a site of fantasy, precarity, and symbolic abundance—the work presents chimeric objects in which allegories of sustenance, danger, and purification merge.
Hennigar’s sculptural vessels are hand-built and adorned with relief carvings and cast details of vernacular objects such as deer hooves, peach pits, puzzle pieces, electric fencing insulators, tools, and toys. Animals are often rendered in ambiguous states of metamorphosis, hunt, or performance. The work’s layered surfaces are built through multiple firings and often incorporate metal components. In two-dimensional works, the carved porcelain imagery is mounted on metal. Employing jeweler’s techniques on a large scale, these works resemble engraved charms. Referencing objects of protection and historical depictions of infernal and sublime landscapes, they imagine possibilities of connection between wild and domestic realms, between chaos and play, and hybridity as an emblem of resiliency.
Captions
- Sang d’encre, 2023, glazed porcelain, overglaze, gold luster, 14 x 8 x 7 inches
- The lightness of feathers, the crushing weight of wings, 2024, glazed porcelain, overglaze, gold luster, 14 x 11 x 8 inches
- Cutting Teeth, 2024, glazed porcelain, overglaze, brass, 52 x 18 x 1 inches
- The hunger that gives legs to wolves, 2023, glazed porcelain, brass, 36 x 10 x 1 inches
- N’en Parlons Plus, 2023, glazed porcelain, overglaze, silver, 11 x 8 x 8 inches
- Like Milk from a Stone, 2022, glazed stoneware, overglaze, ceramic decals, copper, 11 x 6 x 8 inches
- Sap Rising, 2022, glazed stoneware, overglaze, ceramic decals, copper, 30 x 9 x 11 inches
- Fragile Guardian, 2023, glazed porcelain, brass, 36 x 12 x 1 inches
- Moments Between Dog and Wolf, 2022, glazed porcelain, overglaze, ceramic decals, bronze, 21 x 11 x 18 inches
- River Voice, 2020, glazed stoneware, overglaze, digital decals, 9 x 4 x 8 inches
- False Footing, 2023, glazed porcelain, overglaze, 16 x 8 x 8 inches
- You say chimney, I say smoke, 2023, glazed porcelain, overglaze, 16 x 8 x 5 inches
- Pigs and Pearls, 2023, glazed porcelain, overglaze, digital decals, 15 x 10 x 8 inches
- Big Bang, 2022, glazed porcelain, overglaze, digital decals, copper, bronze, 7 x 4 x 8 inches
- Alive and Swimming, 2020, glazed stoneware, overglaze, digital decals, 12 x 5 x 8 inches
- Fair Fortune, 2022, glazed porcelain, overglaze, digital decals, cast bronze, 6 x 5 x 8 inches
