Chelsea, New York
Hanna Pettyjohn
A Mountain's Hands
Silverlens“What does the mountain provide as a home, or as raw material?” Hanna Pettyjohn (b. 1983, Manila, Philippines, lives and works in Dallas, USA) returns to the mountain as a site of origin – a caretaker whose clay-rich volcanic soil is harvested, thrown, and fired into the biomorphic vessels for which her parents are known. Pettyjohn and her sisters grew up near the forested slopes of Mount Makiling, a dormant volcano at the southern edge of Laguna de Bay, the Philippines’ largest lake. Their parents, Jon and Tessy Pettyjohn, are transformative figures in Philippine ceramics: founders of one of the country’s first sustained professional schools for ceramics education, advocates for the use of local clay and glaze materials, and the first to build an anagama (wood-firing) kiln in the country. This body of work departs from Reflections, in Situ (2025), where she “zoomed in” on her father’s ceramics, letting surrounding foliage overtake them. In A Mountain’s Hands, she “zooms out.” Now front and center, her parents’ humble ceramics tower above mountain peaks and reach from lush undergrowth past treelines to clouded horizons. Sari-sari (sundry) stores, residential subdivisions, warehouses, and other urban encroachments shrink to the margins. This inversion of scale – between the handheld and intimate and the sprawling and expansive – exalts the ceramics, in the artist’s words, to a “grand, imposing, and heroic” status. “I want to regard what the mountain gave us,” she reflects. Mount Makiling, in this sense, is not simply a lifeless place or insensate geological formation; it is animate and giving. Its elegant peaks and valleys have long been said to resemble the resting silhouette of Maria Makiling – Dayang Masalanta – a protective spirit, or diwata, sent by the creator Bathala to offer a celestial hand in the everyday toil of its people. In a similar play of mortal and divine, Pettyjohn paints her parents' ceramics as portraits. She reveres clay, form, vegetation, and industry – and their synchrony – melding them into a realm of the ordinary sublime. —Matthew Villar Miranda