Paloma Jimenez

Denver-based artist Paloma Jimenez works primarily with clay to create colorful, sculptural works of often overlooked everyday objects. From discarded fruit peels, medicine bottles, and gum wrappers, to lost socks, buttons, and keys, Jimenez is interested in the poetry of the banal and dispossessed objects of the material world. Using the imagery of ordinary items, Jimenez playfully arranges her subject matter into humorous or surrealist groupings. The resultant ceramic sculptures tell a new story, a story outside the common use of recognizable daily objects.

Interested in the gestural translation of these objects rather than purely representational, Jimenez creates objects with a visible roughness. The hand of the artist is very much present in the visible push and pull of clay. This roughness perhaps signifies the handling these objects would have experienced–bottles crushed before being thrown away or wrappers crinkled up. Through her art, Jimenez encourages us to reconsider the value and beauty in the seemingly mundane objects that surround us. Jimenez suggests that there are new stories to be found in the simplest of things, and that art exists everywhere if one would only take the time to look.