Jamin London Tinsel | Homemades
North View Gallery
Jamin London Tinsel, Towel Table, 2024-2025, mixed media. Photograph courtesy of the artist.
- Exhibition Dates: April 5 – May 1, 2025
- Gallery hours: Monday – Friday, 8am-4pm, Saturdays by appointment
- Opening reception: Saturday, April 5, 2:00 – 5:00 p.m.
- Artist Talk: Thursday, May 1, 12:00 – 1:00 p.m.
“Homemades” is a term that some, including Tinsel’s Italian grandmother, use to describe handmade pasta. In this exhibition, Tinsel investigates the making of home, examining influences from the homes in which she grew up and inviting viewers to consider the ways their own experiences of home have shaped their identities. What does it mean to make a home? How are concepts of home shaped by families of origin? In what ways do the things we learn in our childhood homes inform our building of new homes as adults?
After the death of her mother in 2016, Tinsel began investigating concepts of home, first using cave-like forms, inspired by her interest in Buddhist nun Tenzin Palmo, who spent twelve years living in a Himalayan cave. During a residency at Oregon College of Arts and Crafts in 2018, Tinsel built diverse ceramic caves, thinking of them as spaces of comfort and retreat, even escape from the home. Homemades positions those early caves in dialogue with recent mixed media sculptures that engage with the comforts and discomforts of home through a mix of ceramics and found materials, including salvaged wood and reclaimed textiles.
Jamin London Tinsel, Eighty-Two Tiny Caves, 2019, dimensions variable, ceramic, stains, glazes. Photo: Mario Gallucci.
Tinsel’s mother was schizophrenic and bipolar, and her parents separated before she was born. As a child, her father’s home became a place of stability and constraint, a contrast with the boundaryless home her mother made. One particularly strong memory from visits to her dad’s house is feeling comforted and intimidated by shelves filled with neatly folded stacks of fresh towels. The ceramic and fabric towels found throughout Homemades reference the comfort of her father’s home, yet their precarious positions imbue the comforting forms with instability.
Jamin London Tinsel, Towel Stack, 2024, ceramic, 12” x 24” x 12”. Photograph courtesy of the artist.
Wooden structures on which ceramic towels and houses teeter in the center of the gallery visualize the tensions of Tinsel’s early childhood. The wooden platforms read like broken sawhorses, reminders of the construction process, or for the artist, patriarchal dinner tables and the pedestal upon which she placed experiences with her father growing up. Throughout the exhibition, Tinsel contrasts her father’s home with the home she lived in with her mother.
Jamin London Tinsel, House Table, 2024-25, 5 x 3 x 1.5’, ceramic, reclaimed wood, socks. Photograph courtesy of the artist.
Her mother was an artist, and her home, while chaotic and at times dangerous, was also wildly creative. As a teen, Tinsel felt both loved and suffocated in her mother’s house and was often eager to leave. She remembers escaping out of her bedroom window via a portable fire ladder. The ladders suspended throughout the exhibition evoke these memories. They extend from unseen windows in the gallery ceiling and hang from ceramic home forms that recall Louise Bourgeois’ anthropomorphized Femmes Maison.
Jamin London Tinsel, Mom’s House, 2024, 24 x 5 x 2”, ceramic, stains, glazes, toothpicks. Photograph courtesy of the artist.
Much like Bourgeois, Tinsel’s work is full of forms that both comfort and disturb, reminders that children’s lives can be expanded and/or restricted by the family systems in which they grow. Throughout this exhibition, the artist engages with the ways that families of origin shape us, considering how early childhood knowledge of what home and families look like impacts the homes that adults make. Tinsel’s interest is in the ways that family informs our understanding of ourselves and how we move through the world. While the metaphors Tinsel explores in her work are specific to her own experiences, evidence of prolonged introspection via material and form, they provide space for each of us to consider our own childhood and how our early understandings of home making, inform our engagement with the world around us.
This exhibition was made possible through a generous grant from the Regional Arts and Culture Council.
About the Artist:
Jamin London Tinsel is a studio artist and art educator working in Portland, Oregon. She received her MFA in Ceramics from The University of The Arts in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in 2007. Jamin’s artistic process is a deep dive into self exploration and memory. She seeks answers, attempting to understand the things bubbling to the surface that haunt, taunt, and trouble her, or make her laugh and spark joy. As memories churn inside and seek release, Jamin creates physical objects to share and relate to the experience of other humans to achieve a sense of resolution, acceptance and integration of these issues. Her current body of work came into being through a summer residency at Oregon College of Art and Craft, a group residency at Red Lodge Clay Center in Red Lodge, Montana, and a two-week stint at Ceramic Kingdom in Berlin, Germany.
Learn more about her work at http://www.jaminlondontinsel.com/.