Sculpture is seen as a laborious practice, stereotypically done by men and involving heavy materials. But just as in life, the labor typically performed by women is invisible and taken for granted, often through the historical divide between what is considered art versus craft. Jennifer Pettus’ work exists in the space between these mediums, challenging the construct of how labor is valued and appreciated through the use of cast-off, everyday materials, gendered mediums, and an intimate exploration of repetitive labor and the aggregation of individual actions. Often she chooses familiar materials with stains that could be highlighted or embroiders hair into the surface suggesting an uncomfortable vulnerability that is met by layered textures and riotous color. The familiar tactility of undergarments or stuffed animals are transformed through obsessive, detailed labor into something both universally recognizable and yet deeply intimate and personal.

Pettus’ process is inherently intuitive yet deeply informed by both Feminism and traditional feminine ways of making, as well as personal experiences of motherhood and odd jobs, such as sewing hair into toupees. Though largely non-representational, her unique sculptural forms instinctively bring to mind the body, often through materials that once draped over it. Utilizing minutely detailed textile processes, the laborious decorative surfaces often reference usefulness, such as a button made non-functional through an overwhelming accumulation of them. In works that manage to be serious and comical all at once, she pokes at the discomfort of societies’ relationship to female bodies, by making objects that exist in the crevice of the “other” – neither sexual nor nurturing, these forms speak to our cultural unease with the non-categorizable, existing in multiple interstitial spaces at once and inviting a look into the disquieting human dilemma of having a body.