Over the past three months I’ve been going through a bit of a creative renaissance.
As you know, I started AMARIMA. I’m working on some projects that are legitimately the most fun I’ve ever had in business, and have some pitches out and potential projects right now that I am genuinely thrilled to hear back from. I went to London and presented my mad scientist plans to some outrageously amazing people.
But I also started sculpting.
And I just put one of my first sculptures up for sale today. Remember this one?:
I plan to post one sculpture for sale daily for the next week.
It had me thinking that it’d be fun to share with you where this all is coming from.
I haven’t told you about any of this yet.
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I was always the art class kid.
In one of my first diaries I wrote that I wanted to be an artist like Claude Monet.
But the first time that I started taking art seriously was a fresco class that I took eighteen years ago while studying abroad during my last year of high school in Lazio, Italy.
The class was run in an empty church by three chainsmoking women who I never saw wearing any other color but black. In that class I worked on painting a copy of Flora, Persephone, picking flowers.
Four years later at Columbia in New York, I ended up choosing to do a second major in visual art. I painted a series of at least 25 oil paintings that I titled after an E.E. Cummings poem - “Where our heads lived and were.”
“frosting” 24x24, oil on canvas
2011“My paintings depict surreal recollection of minute increments of time. I specifically use oil paint to achieve a dream-like scene to mirror the fuzzy, ineffable characteristics of memory. My technique strives to employ texture, blurring, and sketching to render these moments in an emotion-infused yet playful way. The importance we assign to certain memories reflects the way we live our lives. The moments we choose to remember relate what we understand to be fun, melancholic, ordinary, beautiful, and meaningful. As such, a simple childhood memory of picking flowers or playing with the frosting on a cupcake can embody an era in our lives, signify time with people we love, and comfort us amidst the unknowingness of the everyday.”
My art professor said that I was sculpting the paint more than painting with it and, when catching me examining an object on her desk one afternoon, told me to try sculpture. I catalogued that comment away somewhere, but somehow never forgot it.
I ended up selling all of the paintings that I made that year except one that is hanging on the wall in front of me.
In my twenties, as you know, I switched into podcasting and videos, writing, postcards, and poetry.
Plastic arts require real space and can be messy, so I started listening to the wisdom of incredible creative people, building community in the way that I do, and playing with words and images.
When you’re an artist, you are a bit afflicted in that you can’t stop making your art. It’s something that is so much a part of you, that you sweat it out.
You feel, everything that you live, so deeply.
And…
Your doodle for a friend becomes their tattoo.
Your poem gets framed and hung above a baby’s crib.
Your playlists become people’s favorite songs.
Your photo portraits become their profile pics.
Your painting becomes a Christmas gift for someone’s wife.
Your book causes multiple readers to quit their jobs, ask their crushes out, take that big leap they were stalling on, travel around the world.
Four months ago in February, I was living through the worst creative block of my life.
Nothing. I could make nothing. I could write nothing.
I tried forcing it and writing a little and my poems genuinely sucked.
It was terrifying for me.
It’s even hard to describe to you now just how much it spooked me back then.
It’s like looking in the mirror one morning in your mid thirties and finding out that your hair is fluorescent green, but you didn’t dye it that way, and no you absolutely cannot pull it off, it doesn’t look good on you one bit, and when you ask people about it, they tell you they love your hair and that it’s just a weird time for you.
It’s like those dreams where you find yourself naked where you shouldn’t be, your teeth fall out, you’re late, you miss your flight.
Night terrors that you don’t remember the morning after.
It became a presenting problem for my therapist - my inability to make art, to write.
How, every time I got even a small kind of confirmation about the kind of person I am, I would get tears in my eyes.
When I look back at that time I, someone with effervescent joy usually, was some kind of depressed.
One day I remembered a ceramics studio that my friend took me to the summer before and signed up for a slot.
Playing with mud would be a good idea.
I made a couple starfish, and a sponge.
The next week, I got happily lost in making a piece where I tried to translate the feeling of the most incredible hug that I’ve ever received.
And then the following week, I made this first piece that I’ve now put up for sale.
Each week since I’ve gone back to the studio, made sculptures.
I’ve posted videos about the process on Instagram. Started a TikTok where just a few of my sculptures got 10k views in only four weeks.
And now I have eight sculptures that I feel good about selling.
I want you to have them.
These sculptures are structures of breath and rupture. They’re not ornamental - they’re organisms. Found relics.
They resemble coral, bone, fossils, sea sponges, or forgotten instruments. They’re emotional and energetic fossils.
Every piece holds contradictions:
Openings and enclosures
Fragility and density
Stillness yet gestural movement
Biomorphic and solid
Abstract yet organic
Fossil and poetic
Wabi-sabi yet marine
Sensory and emotional
They echo somehow.
This piece “A heart breathes” is the first of my new sculpture series called “Coral as it breathes.”
It will be the first one of many.
I love sculpting.
In my mind’s eye I see my own studio here in Barcelona, with a giant wood table, where I sculpt.
A future show where I see you walk through the door.
An experience where people walk through a giant version of one of them Richard Serra-style for AMARIMA.
Versions in metal, wood.
One of these on a shelf at my hotel.
That all happens if I start selling my pieces.
That all happens if you buy them.
For the next week, each day on Instagram and here I will share one of my sculptures for sale.
This one is the very first. Ever.
"A Heart Breathes"
Sculpture by Jenna Mari Matecki
Barcelona, 2025
Edition: Original, One of one
Medium: Ceramic
Materials: PRAI Zumaia clay with firesand
Firing: Single-fired at 1100º C
Dimensions: 34 × 31 × 11 cm (L × W × H)
Weight: 2 kg
Authentication: Signed underneath; certificate of authenticity provided
Display: Indoors, freestanding (tabletop, pedestal, or wall-mounted)
Price: $1,100.00 USD / EUR
Shipping: Ships worldwide from Spain; shipping and packaging costs calculated at checkout
If you feel called to make it yours, I’d be honored.
More coming daily throughout the next week.
In the meantime, my hair is brown.
And I’ve always been an artist, too.
Love,
Jenna
