Front view.
Photograph supplied by the collector; photographer unconfirmed.
All views · 2 images
Jeffrey Porterfield
Untitled, 2019
- Year
- 2019
- Medium
- Wood, found textile (worn sock), used art-handler’s glove and wood glue
- Dimensions
- 5 × 7 × approx. 0.5 cm (H × W × D)
Joseph Clark Collection · JCC-0072
About the work
This small assemblage brings a worn, patterned textile and a used art-handler’s glove into contact with a wooden support. The assemblage is coated in wood glue. The red, yellow and black fabric crosses the face of the work, while the folded glove gathers around one end. On the reverse, exposed wood and battens reveal its construction alongside a handwritten signature and the date 2019.
The materials retain traces of their former use. Read as an assemblage, the work brings bodily contact and the labour of handling art into the same compact object. This is a collection interpretation of the materials and their arrangement, rather than an attributed statement by the artist.
Catalogued as Untitled because no artist-given title is known. The date follows the reverse inscription, confirmed by the collector. Materials and dimensions were supplied by the collector: 5 × 7 cm, with depth approximately 0.5 cm.
Gifted to Joseph Clark in August 2026.
About the artist
Jeffrey Porterfield, also known as JP Porterfield, is an artist, musician and storyteller based in Saugerties, New York. His practice moves between images, performance and sound. His own biography records exhibitions in New York, London and Los Angeles, touring and recording with bands, and live storytelling, including appearances on the Risk! podcast. These activities provide a broader context for the paintings than a purely medium-specific account would allow.
Practice and ideas
Porterfield’s published portfolio includes acrylic paintings on canvas, panel and paper. Titles such as Grandpa Before He Left the Oilfields, TX. #2, Migraines Squirrel Gun Guitar and Child With Camera suggest a field of memory, family, everyday life and invented association. They offer entry points into the work without fixing every image as a literal autobiographical event.
The relationship between a direct image and an open-ended story is useful to the experience of the paintings. A title can start a narrative that the visual material complicates or leaves incomplete. The music and storytelling practices should be understood as parallel ways of shaping attention, rhythm and association, rather than as proof that every picture illustrates a particular song or performance.
Sculpture is also a sustained part of Porterfield’s practice. His studio portfolio documents fabric and wood constructions including Photographer (2005), Bustle (2012) and Wing (2015), and assemblages incorporating boots, furniture and a light fixture. These works provide a context for the combination of clothing, bodily associations and constructed supports in the collection’s small Untitled sculpture of 2019; they do not establish an artist-stated meaning for this particular object.
Career and selected projects
Porterfield’s studio website supplies the clearest primary record of his visual work, including dated paintings and medium descriptions. He also presents Radio BirdMouth on WGXC 90.7 FM, Wave Farm Radio. Essex Flowers’s 2017 New York Flower Festival programme documents his activity across performance, painting, video, music and sculpture and identifies his work with the band Mother Finger. No formal education history or permanent museum collection list has been added where it is not supported by the sources reviewed.
Sources and further reading
Collection research reviewed 21 October 2026. Interpretative commentary is distinguished from documented career information.