Alumni Feature: Jen Harmon Allen

A native of Madison, Connecticut, Jen Harmon Allen first pursued higher education at Wellesley College in nearby Massachusetts in 1991. While she was thrilled to be studying at a prestigious college, Allen was also a fledgling underclassman struggling to discover her strengths. She described her younger self as “lost and intimidated.”

But after a series of coincidences landed Allen in an advanced sculpture class —despite not taking the prerequisite course — it didn’t take long to realize she had a natural gift for sculpting. “I started making sculptures very intuitively, which was surprising to both me and my teacher [Carlos Dorrien],” Allen recalled. “Carlos ran a bronze casting system in our teeny school. He became my mentor, and I started doing bronze work.” After graduating from Wellesley with a BA in Studio Art and serving a mission for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Houston, Texas, Allen searched for MFA programs to further her sculpture training. BYU was one of a few schools with a foundry that still taught traditional techniques. In the ‘90s when Allen started, BYU’s sculpture program was run by Neil Hadlock — who she characterized as “a great fabricator and a real metal genius.” While studying sculpture at BYU, Allen ventured into ceramics as well. A self-described “impatient artist,” she first worked in plaster because it dries quickly. But plaster is an ephemeral medium, she said, and it does not keep well. So she started experimenting with clay.

Allen approached her classmates in ceramics, as well as Von Allen, who was head of the ceramics department, to ask how to build with clay and prepare a glaze. At the time, she didn’t realize how naïve she must have sounded. “Working in clay, it takes years to figure out your technique. It’s a science, really,” she said. “And people who are ceramic artists take a lot of pride in making their own glazes or modifying a glaze recipe they’ve been given, and testing it over and over again and making it their signature glaze.” When Allen’s initial clay sculptures could not stand on their own, she decided she didn’t have enough patience for traditional handbuilding methods and started experimenting with chicken wire, then rabbit wire, to make armatures to support her clay forms. This led Allen to begin her “Armor Dresses” series. Using sewing skills honed since her middle school home economics classes, Allen cut a dress pattern out of fencing wire, pressed clay onto it and fired it in the kiln. Her early dresses emerged unstable as the steel of the wire could not withstand the high temperature required to fire the clay without melting. Eventually, Allen formulated a technique for mixing a clay body that combined paper pulp, fiberglass fibers, sand and other additions to help it stick to the steel. She also developed her own glazes that held the clay and steel together in one, unified material — even when fired below the temperature for when clay vitrifies.

Fifty-three dresses later, “Armor Dresses” have become Allen’s signature series. She was determined to perfect them, and she did — but she bored quickly of the repetition. The dresses weren’t new or exciting, but they brought in a steady flow of cash while her husband, Sam, recovered from a stroke he suffered during a chiropractic procedure in 2006. For four years after Sam’s stroke, Allen continued to make installation work and bronzes for gallery sales, all while caring for her husband and growing family at home. But by 2012, she had mostly stopped creating and exhibiting new work. Although Sam was able to make a modest living after the accident, Allen felt so much guilt about her art not providing a more sizable financial contribution that it stunted her creative progress in the studio. “I was contributing a little financially,” Allen said, “but grinding bronzes in my garage was more an act of desperation than creativity.”

In hindsight, Allen said, she was trying to apply her pre-stroke ideal of art-making to a constrained family dynamic that was completely structured around her husband’s and children’s needs. As a result, she felt unfulfilled for many years. Despite her success in perfecting the form and quality of her dresses and making a solid-selling line of work, Allen was discouraged that she could neither fix her husband nor create new and exciting work. “It got to the point that I was so depressed and miserable that I was driving my family nuts,” Allen said. “My husband has very patiently encouraged me to get back into the studio.” Recently inspired by a shared spiritual experience, the Allens have felt guided to adjust their approach to earning family income. Sam, who was still working part-time until he had a painful relapse in October, is taking time off work to heal. In addition to running their small publishing business, Allen is back in the studio, pursuing new materials and forms. “Sam and I are taking the approach that making an exciting new body of work will energize my art career and help propel me forward,” Allen said. “I personally believe that when an artist’s heart is in her work, that passion shines bright and the work sells itself.”

Finally ready to be patient and work in more delicate processes, Allen’s current work involves handbuilding ceramic busts that are largely inspired by her reverence for the archetypal “Mother Earth,” the divine feminine and her female predecessors on earth. She has always been moved by heroines in literature who forge a path forward despite extenuating circumstances (not unlike herself). She described an image in her mind of a woman climbing a mountainside, and getting to the top to look out at all of creation and feel her potential.

“[The busts] often come off as being elegant and transcendent,” Allen said. “The faces appear idyllic, peaceful, meditative. That’s who I feel we are deep down. We’re divine. We have determination and nobility within us, so that’s what I try to portray.” After thinking for years about making the ceramic heads without ever starting, Allen is happy to finally be moving forward again. While sculpting clay without an armature has required patience, it has also helped her make work she previously thought was impossible. 

"Now that I’m actually confronting and doing it,” she said, “that’s satisfying.”