Jennifer Clifford Danner

Thalassa

2020, bronze, approx. 84”h x 50”w x 25”d

Installation postponed to 2021 due to challenges arising from covid-19 epidemic.

www.jenniferclifforddanner.com

Artist’s Statement

The edge of the sea is a strange and beautiful place. -Rachel Carson

As an island along the coastal waterways, Jamestown and its shorelines focused my thinking onto the Littoral Zone. Thalassa is a poetic reflection on the ocean and its edges, its borderlands in the form of a sculpture of this primordial Goddess of the sea and lonely shores, mother of all fish and creator of all sea-life. A primordial being called for ancient inspiration; she is made of bronze, and she is the effigy of a Goddess. Now as then, the ancient mode of personification provides an acute function; the ocean is no longer vast and unknowable; instead, she is here, beckoning us to the shore, demanding to be duly considered. I intend to create a monument and marker for the community and passersby that will serve as a point of empathy to inspire them in their continued stewardship of the oceans and shorelines. Thalassa: Primordial Goddess of the Ocean, marks out a sacred place to converse with the goddess. She provides an ever-urgent space to meditate on our relationship to the monumental power and ecological fragility of the aquatic ecosystems she embodies.

Biography

Jennifer Clifford Danner is a New York City and Massachusetts based artist. A graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design, Ms. Danner is a figurative painter, working primarily in portraiture and narrative painting in large-scale oils and watercolor. Her interpretation of both the human and organic forms are governed by her vision as an ardent colorist, and her passionate study of the oceans–the nature of our human interaction with the aquatic being a recurring source of inspiration.

Recently Ms. Danner has increasingly turned to new media including new works in ceramics, handmade paper, multimedia, and collaborations in performance. She has exhibited in Providence, RI, Washington, DC, and New York City at Leila Heller Gallery and White Columns among others and has an upcoming solo exhibition in Provincetown, MA later this summer.