Jena Sibille

{Retail Value $1000}

Carved Votive: Cathedral, 2024

Brown Stoneware, Underglaze, Salt Fire Cone 7

9 x 8 x 6 inches

Courtesy of the artist

www.jenasibille.myportfolio.com

All her life Jena Sibille has been drawn to the majesty and mystery of trees. The trees of her childhood and Cajun heritage-Live Oaks and River Birches, Willows, Dogwoods, and Magnolias-tower in her memory. As a girl she felt a familial connection to trees, as well as a deep reverence. Trees continue to retain an ancestral and sacred power in her imagination. Ceramic votives involve detailed, repetitive labor, carving and scoring. She finds these deliberate, highly repetitive activities ritualistic and centering. This labor, and the pieces that result, are forms of devotion, attempts at prayer, or perhaps merely calls into the void, which honor the trees and plead for their survival. Sibille's creative initiatives as the Curator of the Fulton County Schools' Teaching Museum & Archives have earned her a Southeastern Emmy Award in 2024 and two Silver Telly Awards in 2024 and 2021. Her projects have received funding from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Library of Congress, Georgia Humanities and the Georgia Council for the Arts. In 2022 she was selected for a Hambidge Art Center residency and was a finalist for the Forward Art Foundation's Emerging Artist Award in 2003. Sibille served as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Papua New Guinea from 1996-98.

www.instagram.com/JenaSibille_