When I visited artist Jessica Stoller at her New Jersey studio in a former lace factory a few weeks ago she quoted a line from Miranda July’s new book All Fours to me: “In a patriarchy, your body is technically not your own until you pass the reproductive age.”
Aging, sex, and the reproductive body have been front of Stoller’s mind over the past years, as she created a new body of her lavish, ribald, and at times even grotesque ceramic works. The fruits of this labor are now on view in “Split” at P·P·O·W in Tribeca, Stoller’s third solo exhibition with the gallery (through April 5, 2025).
“In this show, I’m thinking about a few splits, for one, the way we have split reproductive capabilities and fetal life from the potentially pregnant person carrying the embryo,” she explained. “But also a split in terms of our relationship to the earth, and the intersection of the natural world being seen as something inert, exploitable, and extractable and the pathologizing of the female body.”
“Split” is a follow-up to “Spread,” Stoller’s last exhibition at P·P·O·W in January 2020, which presented playful and defiant female figures. These works were unabashed, Rococo in their embrace of ornament, and wryly aware of porcelain’s unique art history. At that time, Stoller, who was examining her own body for the first time said, “[As] I age, I can’t help but think about how we are intrinsically trying to slow the clock, to put the body that sags and wrinkles out of sight… My paternal grandma and I were very close. Towards the end of her life, her hands were stiff with arthritis and her fingers angled in unnatural ways; these details are what makes a person, an accumulation of life, uniquely recorded through our bodies.”
Though many of her themes remain the same—the female body, aging, the fuzzy line between the pleasurable and the grotesque, for instance—a more dire, urgent tone characterizes these new works. The “split” of the exhibition title is also a reckoning with the reality before and after the Supreme Court’s 2022 ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson that overturned federal protections for abortion rights.
“My whole adult life has been reeducating myself,” Stoller told me. “ When Roe was overturned it put me on this trajectory of wanting to know more about where this deep-seated misogyny and othering come from.” The artist enrolled in a class on Silvia Federici’s seminal book Caliban and the Witch which examines the intersection of reproduction and capitalism. She also read The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology and the Scientific Revolution, by historian Carolyn Merchant which considers the Scientific Revolution through the lenses of feminism and ecology. “All this has become fodder for the work,” she added.
Anchoring “Split” is a large-scale sculpture entitled Seeing Red (2024), comprising 150 individual ceramic components. The foundation of the work is a tiled red porcelain floor, which has been installed on a low pedestal at the gallery so that it hovers just above the floor. Splashes of various shades of red evoke spilled blood on its surface; strewn on top of these tiles are porcelain forms both human (a pelvis, a hand) and nautical (shells, amphibians). Large white, shimmery orbs, like pearls or eggs, rest almost ominously at intervals throughout it.
“The white orbs could be an egg or something beautiful. Or they could be a wrecking ball,” she said of the installation. “The juxtaposition of this piled almost microbial, bloody pond becomes a site where interior and exterior meet as well as the organic and inorganic.”
Seeing Red hints back to “anatomical Venuses,” pseudoscientific wax sculptures of sleeping women from the 18th and 19th centuries. These inert sculptures of carved open women often wore strands of pearls, hinted at through her inclusion of white orbs. At the same time, her nautical references harken to the platters of 16th-century French potter Bernard Palissy, which were often adorned with snakes and amphibians. The intersection of these influences hints at the subjugation of both the female body and the natural world, as well as dark medical histories relating to the female body. Stoller notes that the work is partly a nod to the story of Gerri Santoro, a woman who died in a hotel room from a botched self-induced abortion, in 1964. The police photograph of her dead body, published by Ms. magazine in 1973, became an inflection point for the abortion rights movement. For Stoller, who was raised Catholic in the metro-Detroit area, and who herself had an abortion at a young age, such works come from a deeply personal place.
Seeing Red was also a work Stoller made more intuitively, a shift in her typically methodical process of sketching and planning, which pushed her artistically. Still, in keeping with Stoller’s past bodies of work, the exhibition revels in detail, with the artist lavishing her works with a provocative level of intricacy. “I’ve always been interested in excesses of detail because detail is also gendered,” Stoller explained. “Art historically, with the classical figure, detail is removed until it becomes an idealized thing. Detail can be a subversive thing.”
Here Stoller’s attention to detail manifests in freestanding and wall sculptures that playfully reckon with associations between feminine ornament and the monstrous, diseased, or debased. In one work, a grasshopper-like figure puts its legs up in what appear to be gynecological stirrups. In another sculpture, Multiply (2024), she evokes a 17th-century Dutch style of ornamentation, known as the Auricular Style, which took inspiration from the human body. A skeletal figure stands astride atop a bulbous mound of flesh. “This skeletal monster has this embryo-like flesh attached to it. I guess I was thinking about endometriosis and unwanted pregnancy and reproductive body morphing and doing things you can only control if you have access to certain procedures and healthcare,” she said.
Stoller’s world has moments of liberation, too, however—a freedom that is found in aging. Crones and cat ladies, who are aged beyond their reproductive years, appear as wizened matriarchs, liberated and unabashed. In Untitled (Eve’s Herbs), a wrinkled naked woman with flowing gray hair hovers over a pile of leaves and herbs which are possibly abortifacients, a nod to the Salem Witch Trials. The artwork title alludes to the book Eve’s Herbs: A History of Contraception and Abortion in the West by John M. Riddle which examines the history of herbal pharmacopeia for birth control and abortion in the Western world and how that knowledge was suppressed, but survived in coded forms often associated with witchcraft.
In the work Hourglass (2024), a porcelain hourglass-shaped work, a Medusa-like woman figure appears on both sides of the vessel with cats and serpents flanking her. “It’s about moving out of this reproductive period and into the cat lady monstrous age which is great,” she said “I’m ready to fully embrace it.”
Some works even take delight in the female body. One work echoes the shape of the clitoris which was only fully charted by the Australian urologist Helen O’Connell in recent years. “It’s this crazy boomerang shape, a pleasure boomerang,” said Stoller. “Some works are more positive or hopeful even if there are moments of grief.”
Stoller acknowledges that she feels she is living in a kind of paradox. “ My mom, for example, grew up when abortion was illegal and then legal for most of my life, but now as I’m moving out of reproductive years it’s switching again. I’m thinking about cycles of time and past and present,” she said. She sees places of hope even against a grim backdrop. “I’ve been seeing these conversations coming up around menopause. This generation doesn’t want to be like our mothers and suffer silently. At the same time, there is acceptance of menopause as a natural space of the body and not wanting to stigmatize or shame it.”
Ultimately Stoller believes ceramics are uniquely suited to exploring these complex questions about the body and aging. “Ceramics is so time-based. You have to have a sensitivity to the passage of time and its effects.”