Jenny James is a ceramic artist working in San Luis Obispo, California.

Jenny received a BFA in photography from CSULB in 2003. Her photographic work, heavily influenced by the New Topographics movement, focused on documenting human’s mark on the land, with a pull towards the mundane and absurd alterations we make to the landscape and the inevitable desolation and decay that follows - the returning to earth.

After years of teaching art to children and raising her own, Jenny resumed a ceramics practice in 2020, a long held interest, and is a currently a ceramics student at Cuesta College. In clay, she has found an extension of her previous documentary work. Human marks in earth. Making absurdities. Existentially pondering their/her decay.

Jenny has a particular fascination with ceramic materials - where they come from, how they get here, and what they do - and how their geographic history becomes part of the objects created with them. Often the curiosity and experimentation around materials, especially in glaze and surface texture, drives the work. The crustier the better.

An obsessive collector of mid-century ceramics (and furniture!), Jenny has a deep reverence for California’s long lineage of studio and commercial potteries, and for the broader California design culture. In her spare time she runs a blog focused on mid-century design, restoration, and preservation.