Wild Is The Wind

Jennifer Rochlin’s first monograph, Wild is the Wind, is a catalyst for autobiographical and cultural storytelling spanning seven years and featuring more than 40 works. Illustrated with 131 color plates, the book is a collection of feelings, memories, and experiences shaped as hand-built clay vessels that defy conventional categories of both contemporary art and traditional craft.

Rochlin’s clay works are diaristic records made permanent by fire. They are uncommon sites for intimate storytelling that converge painting, drawing, and sculpture. Personal memories and general stories are carved, scratched, painted, and glazed onto the vases, with nature as the constant backdrop that frames the foreground of most narratives. Furthermore, representation follows a filmic composition, evident in the fact that stories cannot be taken as a whole but can only unfold over time and in the round. Nonlinearity, layering, and fragmentation are paired with a certain naïvité and avoidance of craft virtuosity to elevate the ordinary into the mythic, the fleeting everyday into artistic moments.

The publication features essays by journalist and writer Alexis Okeowo and artist Tony Marsh, as well as a series of diary-like entries by Rochlin herself, pairing short narratives with specific pieces and the events that unleash them. The book is co-published with Sorry We're Closed, Brussels.