Jennie Jieun Lee

Ridgefield, Connecticut

The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum

Jennie Jieun Lee is perhaps best known for her abstracted ceramic portraits covered in bright, painterly glazes. So, it was a surprise to enter “Luteal Elements and Grooves,” her first solo museum exhibition (on view through May 25, 2026), and find only two works with color; the remaining four sculptures consist of muted, earth-tone ceramics and repurposed electric kilns. The largest, textile-based work, however, does showcase some of Lee’s masterful color work. Hung like a curtain across two walls, Slow Cool, 15 min hold (2025) presents a magnified view of two glaze tests printed on poly-silk. The rightmost portion has a cosmic or womb-like feel, with reds and blue-purples spreading out in splotches and veins before merging into a field of greens and sky-blues that conjure the dense foliage of a jungle or a close-up of intricately colored feathers.

Encountering Lee’s glaze mixing and handling on a monumental scale is a delight, and it also make the muted ceramic sculptures pop. Made for the exhibition, these large-scale works, fashioned from abandoned kilns that act as relational supports for smaller ceramic works, feel like altars. Setting the tone for what’s to come, they radiate with material nerdiness: placing defunct kilns center stage is a clear statement of obsession with material and process. And Lee’s aesthetics are so finely tuned that she makes even the most awkward of electric kilns—clunky utilitarian objects no matter how they’re altered—an invitation for reflection.

Figures (2025) brings identity and memory, two of the show’s central themes, into focus, with five hand-built figurines sitting atop or leaning against their kiln-based supports. Lee built these rough-hewn and expressive figures during a residency at Township10 in North Carolina, using a soil-rich local clay made by Starworks Ceramics. One, seated on the edge of the kiln, has a downward gaze and a body full of tool and drag marks. Another, seated atop a vessel with a ceramic mouse behind it, looks pensively into the distance. A third stands on the floor, leaning against the kiln, arms crossed in front of her belly. This is a recognizable pose of the luteal stage, the second half of the menstrual cycle in which rapid hormonal changes can cause a variety of symptoms including mood changes, fatigue, and abdominal pain. In accompanying audio, Lee indicates that these figures are a return to self-portraiture at a time when her own hormones are dramatically changing: “Clay will always be the perfect recorder of time,” she says. Though Figures may be the only direct reference to the exhibition title, the kiln, in general, makes conceptual sense as a metaphor for what some women experience in the luteal stage and/or, like Lee, in perimenopause. There is the feeling of undergoing physically alterations and chemically changing, much like clay and glaze transforming in a firing.

If Figures is a record of self and time, then Message Kiln (2025) is a record of relationships and Lee’s experience as an educator (she currently teaches ceramics at Tufts University). Message Kiln is covered in a year’s worth of notes from students and staff who use the kiln on a weekly basis. The notes are attached with small ceramic pieces (faces, test tiles, words, or thumb prints pressed into clay pieces) that have been turned into magnets. Some of the messages are instructional, written on ripped scraps of paper—“cone 06 lowfire please” and “needs to be fired by Tuesday”—while others are more emotive, scrawled on paper towel strips—“don’t worry…,” “so sorry.” The remaining surfaces are covered with hastily made test tiles and tubes. The piece has a lot of energy for something stone-still. It recalls the way that younger students pass notes to each other in class, giving a feeling of cooperation tinged with nostalgia.

The narrow space of the final gallery is perfectly suited to hold Marie (2022), a large-scale re-creation of the tomb of Marie Catherine Laveau (1801–81), the “Voodoo Queen of New Orleans.” Lee rebuilt the mausoleum from a nearly 30-year-old memory of visiting the site when it was still free to the public (guided tours are now required). Since Laveau’s death, her tomb has been a pilgrimage site, with petitioners making offerings and marking Xs on the structure as a way to request favors. When Lee visited, it was “surrounded with flowers, coins, every miscellaneous object you can think of…Some of the Xs were written with pencil, pen, brick dust, lipstick.” In the gallery, visitors are encouraged to make their own X marks on the re-created tomb and leave an offering while exploring the ceramic vessels, flowers, and other humble contributions left at its base by Lee and others. Like Message Kiln, Marie is a poignant work about loss, memory, and collective energy, and the ways they reverberate through time.