FACes & PlaceS
The Arts July 2005

Penelope Fleming
by Marilyn Bullock

It’s about relationships - relationships between people, relationships of forms." This is just one of the ways in which Penelope (Penney) Fleming describes her current series of wall sculptures - mostly ceramic, inspired by rock and stone formations. Her pieces "represent the idea of life’s complexities and situations as shown with the inner-relationships of abstract forms. Each piece becomes a metaphor for her current thoughts."

Penney was born and raised just outside of Detroit, Michigan. She can’t remember a time when she wasn’t working on some kind of art project. Penney attended Albion College, where she studied art and literature there for two years before moving to the University of Michigan, looking for the stimulation of a larger university campus.

Upon graduation from college she started to teach ceramics at a high school where she would spend her time at the potter’s wheel honing her skills so she could better instruct her students. Although she had taken pottery classes in college, it wasn’t until this time pottery became a priority.

Thereafter Penney returned to graduate school to attain a Masters of Fine Arts at the School for American Craftsmen at Rochester Institute of Technology in Rochester, New York with a major in ceramic sculpture. She then moved to Elkins Park, PA, outside of Philadelphia and opened a studio and began exhibiting her work in galleries across the USA. Later she also taught 3-D Design and Furniture Design part time at Drexel University for seven years. She now teaches Architectural and Technical Drawing, 2D and 3D CAD (computer aided drafting,) and a course called Building Structures at Cheltenham High School in Wyncote, PA. Just as Penny likes to be challenged, she continually throws out challenges to her students. One of her goals is to arm her students with usable skills for realistic careers in the related fields of engineering.

Although Penney started out as a potter, she is really a sculptor who designs sculptures for the wall. She thinks, dreams, and designs in 3D. If she can get the viewer to walk around her work or view it from end to end, she feels that she has accomplisher one of her goals. There is a beautiful depth to Penney’s work - rare to the medium in which she works - which draws the viewer into the work, often with trompe l’oeil effects.

Penney is a planner, a builder, a designer, an architect, a ceramist, a carpenter, a sculptor, and a chemist. Her current body of work requires her to use all of these skills, many of them self-taught over her thirty plus years of working with clay. Penney is forever devising new techniques to get the results she envisions for her work - mostly because existing methods will not give her the results she wants. As an example, Penney makes her own clay and mixes her own glazes so she has more control of the media.

Due to each client’s needs and their unique architectural space in which the wall sculpture will appear Penney designs each work in detail before starting the process of creating it. She starts with the site specific space where the sculpture will "live" and then begins her design with large blocks of space in mind and works her way through the process of overall design, individual section design and construction, armature design, and, finally surface treatment. Because most of her work is commissioned work, her clients know how the work will look, where it will be displayed, and what will be necessary to mount it on the wall.

Not surprisingly, Penney’s ideas come from nature. Her vacations are often in areas where there are naturally forming rock formations. Unusually colored and shaped rocks line the windowsills in her office and she has hundreds of photos of the natural rock formations she so adores.

Penney’s philosophy: Think, sketch, make, document and then do it all again and again….

Penney Fleming teaches ceramic classes and offers workshops where she offers many of the techniques she has perfected. You can contact her at pfleming34@comcast.net.

Penney was recently a featured artist at the New Hope Arts, Inc. Annual Indoor Sculpture Exhibit in May/June 2005.