NEW YORK, NY.- The New York Studio School is presenting Touch Me, a solo exhibition of ceramic sculptures by Jenny Lynn McNutt. The most recent sculptures in Touch Me were created during several residencies at Taoxichuan Art Center in Jingdezhen, China, the historic center for porcelain production and present-day creative hub for artists and designers from around the world. Other works were made during residencies at the European Ceramic Center, The Netherlands, Taos, New Mexico and McNutt’s upstate New York studio.

McNutt’s sculptures, which have been described as “a nativity of squirms,” express the force, distress, and urgency of biological life today. “The elastic continuum of biological life fascinates me, awe-inspiring as it is,” writes McNutt of these otherworldly, and yet deeply relatable figures. “A preoccupation with the interrelatedness of all life, of mutable boundaries, has been consistent throughout my work. In both my sculpture and painting, forms are hybrids of mingled boundaries, alluding to an ancient kinship with our fellow animals and our own mutability.”

In his essay “World Turtle,” poet Tom Sleigh explores this kinship through McNutt’s ongoing “investigation of our human-animal/animal-human nature.” Sleigh points to the “ambiguous boundaries” that run through McNutt’s work, vividly embodied by her zhenmushou, “fiercelooking earth spirits placed in tombs as guardians of the dead.” Writes poet and critic John Yau, “I do not think it is a stretch to suggest that McNutt’s hybrid creatures occupy a world that is adjacent to ours, and that the border between them is porous.”

A special edition catalogue to accompany the exhibition was produced by Grid Books in collaboration with NYSS and features high-quality reproductions of many of these works, as well as critical essays by distinguished writers John Yau and Tom Sleigh, and poetry by Carol Durak.