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The artist’s artist

Jen Deibert doesn’t care much for categories. “I would not call myself a potter,” she says, although her cozy cluttered studio is packed with ceramic pieces. (It actually looks like a vintage shoppe and a crystals booth got married in a kiln and had children.) Asked about her art, Deibert simply says, “I make things.” But whatever she’s creating, she clearly has The Touch, because people love her work.

Deibert starting creating early: “I always loved rocks and crystals and digging in the dirt.” By the time her family moved to Charlottesville in her middle-school years, she recalls, “I was making my own necklaces and earrings. My parents loved to go to antique shopping—they’d take me along, and I would get these great vintage jewelry pieces and take them apart to make new things. And the girls at school would say, ‘Could you make me something?’ I would decorate my notebook covers, and people would say, ‘Where did you get that?’”

Next, Deibert says, she taught herself how to make stained glass, and sold it on the Downtown Mall. She left college because she couldn’t decide on a major; she got a real estate license, but all she really wanted to do was make things. She has no formal art training: “I never liked sitting still or following directions,” Deibert says with characteristic candor. 

She kept on doing what she loved: finding and using vintage jewelry, clothing, and objects to make new things in her own eclectic style. But she found the distinction people made between her work as “craft,” and the more valid, respectable “art” to be a false one. “It’s taken me 45 years to say I’m an artist,” she says.

Photo: Eze Amos

Two years ago, Deibert began developing her own approach to ceramics. She had bought a cheap potter’s wheel to try out (“I hated it—it’s now a spider house”), but she found working with clay and hand-building felt really familiar. “Working with the earth […] there are endless possibilities. There’s nothing you can’t make from clay.” 

And to prove it, Deibert’s current and most popular creations are trophies—recognition of achievements which have nothing to do with competition. Her trophies are child-like, homemade, painted in gleaming white and bright colors, each one unique and proudly displaying affirmative or thought-provoking mantras: “Keep going.” “You’re doing great.” “Good job floating through space.” “Is any of this even real?” “Oh dear, what a year!” Even, “We’re going to need a better trophy.”

Deibert says her ideas start from a phrase. “My [work] is more about the message, but in a physical thing you can touch,” she says. “It’s more about the things I’m trying to get people to think about.” Many of these ideas come to Deibert while she is meditating under a special lamp called a Lucia No. 3. She has one mounted over the couch/bed in her studio; she characterizes its impact as “like a more modern version of staring into the flames. It’s a tool for creativity.”

Deibert works on other objects as well. Scattered around her studio are ceramic cups, vases, and animals as well as vintage objects modified with crystals, paint, clay, and papier-mache. (A favorite example: a table lamp modified into a bright yellow banana decorated with quartz prisms and one staring bright blue eye, emblazoned with “Don’t forget we are here to have fun!” around the shade.) Her works are available for sale on her Facebook and Instagram pages and at The Quirk Gallery.

While she’s enthusiastic about her ceramic work, Deibert also wants to continue working with jewelry and vintage clothing. “I have this mental list of all the things I want to make,” she says. “When I get old, I want to have all these things [around me] that were made by me.” 

Which is a wonderful description of the Deibert home in Esmont, where Jen, husband Josh, 8-year-old daughter Birdie (“already a wonderful artist,” says her proud mother), and their five dogs have lived since 2017. The large farmhouse has a charmingly overgrown Secret Garden atmosphere. Her studio in the vine-draped English basement has a worktable watched over by a turquoise papier-mache dolphin, a plastic chair the shape of a giant cupped hand, and the Lucia meditation bed under a parachute canopy. 

Whether it’s vintage jewelry, a second-hand lamp, or a 1950s housedress, “I just like recycling old things,” Deibert says. “I love pointing out or finding things other people ignore. They are begging you to look at them. We all want to be validated.”