For Jean Antolini, art isn’t a hobby or a profession in the traditional sense. It’s a way of seeing, and she sees it everywhere, even in debris floating to the shore.
Based in Ventnor, Antolini has spent most of her life immersed in creativity. She’s worked as a stagehand and theater technician — a role that fed her understanding of materials, mechanics and transformation — for “the better part of her life.”
Though the mediums of her work vary, most of them feature faces — a reflection of Antolini’s face pareidolia, the phenomenon of seeing faces in inanimate objects.
Living on the water, she notices the debris that floats ashore — fragments of wood, branches, scraps — and transforms it into art.
The instinct to spot personality in the overlooked became the foundation of what Antolini calls “assembly art.”
Other materials were gathered in a variety of places.
Antolini collects wood from the shoreline, then visits a woodworking shop in Hammonton that specializes in teak and rare woods for boats, gathering discarded scraps. From those pieces, she carves noses, shapes features and builds expressive, often whimsical faces.
Years ago, she purchased a vintage box of dentist sample teeth on eBay — porcelain replacements once used to match size and color for patients. The teeth found their way into her sculptures, giving them uncanny grins.
Eyes might be marbles or molded clay. Hair could be branches, salvaged wire — even old theater rope.
Antolini also “dumpster dives,” often cruising neighborhoods on trash night, in search of forgotten treasures.
“If I see a big pile of trash, I’ll do a U-turn,” she said.
Once, police stopped her for driving slowly through a neighborhood, thinking she was casing houses.
One of her wooden heads hangs inside Positively 4th Street Cafe, where Antolini has held multiple shows, and has begun to change with time.
“It’s starting to lose its teeth,” Antolini said. “It’s aging right in front of you. It’s like it’s taken on its own life.”
Its hair is salvaged ropes that were used to raise and lower scenery at the old Harris Theater. When the theater renovated and discarded the materials, Antolini rescued them.
“I always feel like I can make something out of anything,” she said.
That philosophy endured even after devastation. During Hurricane Sandy, flooding destroyed her scroll saws and sanding equipment, halting production of the wooden faces.
Instead of retreating, Antolini shifted mediums.
Today, much of her work falls under collage and mixed media. She combines painting and photography, layering found imagery into new narratives. She also creates short films and documentaries.
“It’s all art to me,” she says. “I’m not a painter, so to say, at all.”
Her current passion, however, is political art, which highlights her dissatisfaction with the political climate and women’s rights being affected.
For Antolini, art is fluid — assembled and disassembled, reclaimed and reimagined. It’s everywhere, emerging from debris and bits and pieces around her, ready to speak back to the world — often with a grin.
“It’s not something you just get into,” she said. “I think just everything you do, you look at it as art…I’ve considered everything art.”
