-My artistic process -(gentle music) feeds my wild mind.

My name is Jennifer McCohnell.

I'm a conceptual artist working mostly in fiber and ceramics.

I was always the creative person in my family.

My great-great-grandfather made wide oak baskets for gathering cotton and whatever crops.

Women quilted around me was not something that I saw women do or that I participated as a child.

It was just sort of a part of the environment.

I knew that quilts were being made and I knew how to do that.

For me, understanding how to do things like, sew or cook did rely on someone showing me how to do it.

I've always been the kind of person who could read a book and figure out how to do a thing, but with hands-on intimate kinds of making, I think that there's something in the energy exchange and the looking and the seeing that can't necessarily be conveyed through words.

I think that translates into the work that I do now because all of those kinds of arts are best done and learned in community.

And whether or not that community has been my family or the adopted communities that I found myself in Alabama, that's where I have gained confidence as well as skill in my ability in these various mediums.

Because my work is so rooted in concepts, like I'm always thinking about something or another that has driven me into all of these different mediums.

A lot of the work that I've done this far has been in ceramic, and I have a love-hate relationship with clay.

I just do.

I hand build and I love that process.

That process is very, you know, sort of zen and visceral and whatever.

Working in fiber, there's a lot of control.

And so I try to allow experimentation in or idiosyncrasies where they happen, if that's in my stitching, you know, I hand stitch, it's imperfect.

Painting is probably the place where I feel the most free in my artistic practice, maybe in my life in some ways because it is just intuitive.

It is responding to a color, to an emotion.

Painting is sort of, you know, my emotions dancing or some sort of thing, and then I get to resolve the issues with color or line that are whatever.

But the core of it is that it's meditative, but it's also, it's compulsive.

You know, I can have something on the easel and I can be compelled to come to the easel and put like one blue mark.

It's like two inches, like right there.

Okay, now it's fine, but I have to do that, right?

And people will say to me, well, you know, how do you know if it's finished?

And I'm like, well, when it stops looking like a hot mess to me, then it's finished.

And they're like, what does that mean?

And I'm like, ah, I can't tell you.

But that's my process, right?

It's a hot mess.

I put the blue line, no longer a hot mess.

I think a lot of people think that intuitive painting or abstract painting, it's just kind of slapping paint there.

And for me at the beginning, there is much paint being slapped around, right?

But it's in the resolving of that, of all of that into something that has some sort of harmony or balance.

All of my work is rooted in the intersectionality of memory and identity.

When I think about home and I think about, you know, where I was born, my childhood home, my family, things like that.

That's home.

But this is a deeper sense of home that gets to my origin as a black person in America, my origin as a black person in America, in the South.

And it reminds me of all that.

(gentle music continues) Everyone who made me went through.

So the house represents resilience, home, cultural roots, that chair, that ladder back chair.

All of this is about the reverence that I have for the community of black women that I grew up around.

Those chairs are, and were thrones because I saw these women as these like titans, you know, in my life just because, you know, they were just everyday women, but they were strong and pretty and smart and you know, all these things, they would have on the porch, any number of those ladder back chairs.

And if you're from the south, you know what I'm talking about.

Thinking about being an American black woman from the South, and what that means, this time in juncture in America is that for some, I'm still looked at as a person who should still be in a shack of an enslaved person.

That's the reality.

For me, that's a part of my story.

And I'm fine with acknowledging that, like I can't do anything with that.

But I don't want to forget, and I don't think that people should forget that piece of my history as a black American woman.

So in that way, these objects are intentional because I'm not done thinking about 'em.

I'm not done saying things about 'em.

I'm not done, you know, saying things about the remarkable everyday resiliency of black people and black women in particular.

I'm not done with that.

I probably won't ever be done talking about that.

I think that the wisdom that I'm coming to understand is that spend less time worrying about resolving yourself or resolving whatever, and just be in your life, you know, try to be present in your life.

(chuckles) As my mother would say, you know, trust your own mind.

That's the hardest thing to do.

The reality is you can't do anything but that.

You can only make your work.

You can't make your work like anyone else's.

Just begin and continue.

(gentle music continues)