Jessica Abbott Williams was born in Washington D.C. and because her father worked in international affairs and her mother is Dutch, she and her sisters grew up traveling extensively and living around the world including years spent in Bangkok, Thailand and Vienna, Austria. As an undergraduate she studied English Literature and Poetry at Westmont College in Montecito. After college she worked for many years in New York at the Museum of Modern Art, Chanel and the Council on Foreign Relations. At the age of 29, she returned to California to study ceramics at the California College of the Arts and received a BFA in 1997.
Since 1997 she has owned and operated Brushstrokes, a community art space and ceramics studio in Berkeley. She has maintained her own studio practice in ceramics, weaving, and painting. Jessica has sold her line of ceramics at the SFMOMA Museum Store, the Palo Alto Art Center Gallery Shop, The Gardener and Erica Tanov in Berkeley. Contact her if interested in purchasing art at jessie.williams@me.com.
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Artist Statement:
To observe a subject—concrete, specific, singled out—is to be in the moment. The perspective is deep, not wide. Life is overwhelming when scanned too quickly or from too long a view. Art-making is a meditation, the result is an abstraction, a remnant, a souvenir of a journey taken, a token. There may be some reflected beauty in a line or a composition which has a secondary life in the imagination of the viewer. And in so doing, the very act of creation passes a spark between two people, a shared experience of what life is like on this earth together.