Jake Jacobson, Ceramic Sculptor

Produced by Joel Geyer, Nebraska ETV Cultural Affairs
Adapted from the documentary Is It Art?

[Jake Jacobson:] "This would be representational of my later work where there are these dark pieces. and I'm still in the teapot format. The teapots are a very distinctive form for me to work on. I enjoy the teapot." Jake Jacobson teaches ceramics and 3-D design at the University of Nebraska-Kearney. For more than 10 years he's been focusing most of his personal work on a series of whimsical clay teapots that look like they're made of metal.
[Jake:] "Initially when my body of work started I viewed these as artifacts. Almost like they weren't meant to be seen now, but if I was to come back several years later hundreds of years and dig them up,that's the process you'd find them. It was almost like it was a part of another culture, a culture that didn't know how to build real teapots. 
"I sometimes call myself an artist, but I'm most happy calling myself an object maker. I employ all the mental tools and stuff that an artist uses you know, the elements, the principles in composing a piece. But I see them as objects. Whether or not they become art, that will be for someone else to decide. I'm dead serious about my work and what I do. But I do find that my work is fun to do and there's a certain quality about the things. There are pieces here that remind me of people, and I think that people are basically humorous.
[Museum of Nebraska Art Director John McKirahan:] "Jake Jacobson is a real craftsman as well as being a fine artist. His work calls into question all of those kinds of preconceived notions that many of us have about, What is art? This is a craft, not an art. Or this is not anything. This is just something similar to what I put on my dining room table."
[Jake:] "Growing up here in the Midwest, a farmer will make his own equipment. The builder will improvise and make things. I've been intrigued by the objects that men built to do a task, and they're oftentimes just put together on a site. But yet they're kind of art objects, in a way. The industrial nation that we had grown to become was all hinged upon the objects that we made.
We no longer have that tradition. We're now becoming information processors and distributors and service oriented. We're moving farther and farther away from objects and growing up with families that the father produces an object. He can show his son what he does. This is what I do, you know. You can show him a diskette now of what he does.

"My father was a plumber and I got well acquainted with plumbing and how things go together and how buildings go together and the way things look and how they weave together and the design aspect. My dad used to plumb so it looked right. Not only functioned right, but it had to look right to him, you know."
[Jake, in the process of adding a wheel to a teapot:] "The wheel got put on these pieces when I was thinking about travel mugs. Aren't we requiring a lot of the objects, you know, that we're commonly accustomed with like a good stoneware cup, you know now we've got to modify it to travel. And I go, well, if we want to move things, why not put wheels?
"A couple of days ago I came into the studio in the morning to get started and there was a blank place over here on the corner of the shelves and on the floor there was a white mass of broken piece in here and I just left it there. I was kind of busy and that and I got thinking about that, you know, how did that piece get off there? Did it commit suicide? Did it just jump, roll away, roll over the edge?"
"They're the dream machines if you wish. They are the mystical, the magical things of which you don't know what they do.   "Will it last? Will it endure time?
"You know, I'm flirting with disaster, on these pieces, some of them and yeah, I kind of like the dangerous element about them. They may exist 'till tomorrow. They might jump off the shelf. You never know."