Jem
maker, ceramicist, artist
Jemma is a hand building ceramicist who graduated with a First class honours degree in Fine & Applied Arts from the University of Ulster, Belfast. Her studio is based in Newtownabbey, Co. Antrim.
Creating ceramics influenced by her natural surroundings and events in her life, she applies traditional hand building techniques to craft unique, sculptural forms using clay.
Her passion for making is driven by her need for learning. Inspired by natural landscapes and human anatomy, she uses her craft as her own personal therapy as well as an outlet for her thoughts and emotions.
"I use my practice as an opportunity to visually understand vascular dementia and how it affects. I believe ceramic is a way to capture memories through making."
maker, ceramicist, artist
Jemma is a hand building ceramicist who graduated with a First class honours degree in Fine & Applied Arts from the University of Ulster, Belfast. Her studio is based in Newtownabbey, Co. Antrim.
Creating ceramics influenced by her natural surroundings and events in her life, she applies traditional hand building techniques to craft unique, sculptural forms using clay.
Her passion for making is driven by her need for learning. Inspired by natural landscapes and human anatomy, she uses her craft as her own personal therapy as well as an outlet for her thoughts and emotions.
"I use my practice as an opportunity to visually understand vascular dementia and how it affects. I believe ceramic is a way to capture memories through making."
'Jemmas work inspired by Father's fight with Dementia'
For young ceramicist Jemma Millen the experience of caring for her father who has vascular dementia has prompted her to rethink her career.
Jemma graduated from the University of Ulster in 2012 with a First Class Honours in Fine and Applied Arts. Having spent the past six years helping to care for her father, she is taking time to focus on her practice.
Her father, who is 82, is now in a care home. Jemma says that caring for him and seeing how his condition deteriorated, has transformed her plans for a career.
“I helped look after my father for six years including my time at the University. It affected me a lot but I wanted to know what was going on inside his head. I began to look at how working with materials such as clay is something that can stimulate the brain and help people,” added Jemma.
Her own work for her degree was inspired based on photographs from her father’s PET Scans an imaging test which studies the brain.
“The PET scans have a range of colours that determine the level of activity in the brain from red (high activity) to blue (low activity). You can see how a person’s brain has deteriorated,” added Jemma.
Around the same time, Jemma had a flight over Strangford Lough and was struck by the similarity between the islands scattered around the lough and the pictures of the PET Scans.
“I saw all of those beautiful islands and saw the connection with the patterns in the brain scan. It was so emotional to see this huge land become so small from the air. Strangford Lough is a place that holds fond memories for me as it was one of the places that my dad used to drive the family to for picnics at the weekends.”
The result was her ‘Infarction Series’, which consists of five forms, derived from the scattered islands of Strangford Lough. Each piece represents an area of the brain with its surface a unique colour associated to the PET colour code.
Beneath the 'shore' line of the colour is a volcanic glaze. This harsh organic glaze contrasts the vibrating surface and mimics the notion of a disease with its sense of repetitive growth. Each surface acts to represent its stage in the disease with its form mimicking the fjord outline of the deterioration process in a human brain.