Jesse Albrecht

Artist Statement:

Ashtrays and pipes and have been on the top of my list with functional and historical ceramics for a long time. Radical ownership is at the core of “It’s your fault,” and this isn’t a blame game or victim mentality, but the opposite. It’s life changing when choice and agency is accentuated.

I saw the live footage on 9/11, as I walked through the student union to graduate life drawing class. Three semesters later I was in Iraq, deployed with the Iowa National Guard as a combat medic. They didn’t issue me my aid bag. They also forgot to issue the ceramic plates (SAPI—small arms protective insert) that would actually stop bullets, until just before we came home.

Parts of my work strives to be honest and accountable to the enigmatic experience of serving in Iraq, and my path “coming home” working my way to recovery and redemption. Facing myself and doing the work to recover from war was the hardest thing I’ve ever done. Thanks to my art history classes, I was aware of the historical-cultural significance of the ruins of Nineveh, across the street from the children’s hospital in Mosul, Iraq, where we would deliver medical supplies.

I realized I become what I focus on, and the use of commercial underglaze decals are used as training wheels in my visual pallet to create compositions that use symbols, images, and patterns that are meant to deal with positive aspects in a life preserver/oxygen mask/gratitude functional application. In the fall of 2019 I spent 2 months at the Montana VA hospital Trauma Recovery Unit, and it saved my life. The program felt like a last-ditch effort, after 16 years of desperately trying to “come home,” my “soldier’s heart” became increasingly debilitating– despite my best efforts ranging from Western & Eastern medicine, outpatient therapy, prescription pills, alcohol, drugs, sex and danger. Many things factored into my recovery, but being healthy for my daughter was the driving force, and God reached me in a first hand, non-dogmatic problematic human way–but in a universal timeless truth, love and beauty kind of way.

Throwing a pot on the wheel requires a physical presence, and the compositional creation is spiritual—and a collision of the sacred and the profane. I make objects to hold and carry things, physically and metaphorically. Brush painted and sprayed underglaze, in addition to commercial underglaze decals, along with stamps and molds are tools and materials I use in creating compositions.

Learn more on Jesse’s website