Jen Jenkins Visual Artist Statement
The landscape is widely understood to be a phenomenon that is continually in the making and undergoing change therefore at any given time it embodies a degree of ephemerality. It has the potential to be a potent-laden threshold from one state to another. My work critically and practically examines our understanding that borders, landscape, light and water, in contemporary visual arts, transcends history and remains relevant today. My interests are anchored in ways of seeing, thinking, and making by engaging in formal visual elements in combination with conceptual strands from environmental art, politics, and philosophy.
Without the conventions of a traditional vista or horizon, my landscapes of fog, mist, and gloom seek to reveal a suggestion of emptiness in order to capture an experience of the infinite. I focus on humanity’s experience of nature or natural events to convey a philosophical notion of The Sublime & our understanding that we dwindle into absence.
With influences from abstract expressionists and their predecessors in romantic painting, I engage in an artistic practice based on the deconstruction of the photographic image and the subversion of the equipment used. The idea that you can 'change the world' is rooted in The Romantic. My abstract images assert both the primacy of natural light (the raw material of photography) and the ambiguity of content. I hope to interrogate post-photographic practices under post-conceptual indices pursuing outcomes employing photography, film, installation, painting.
My work addresses the processes found in the theory of photography by making ties between past and present and fact and fiction. I explore narratives that are a more meditative response to humanity's spiritual self. Through this media, I make use of the concept of ecocriticism as a framework within which to explore dynamic forces at work both culturally and physically within the term landscape. Environmentalism is a set of cultural and political responses to a crisis in human’s relationships with their surroundings. Nature and culture, past and present cannot be treated as distinct from one another.
The nature of photography has changed from artistic documentation to a form of instantaneous communication following the rise of the camera phone. Speed of communication has been increased by the Internet and offers the opportunity to produce imagery and a terrifying overload of information, displacing conventional barriers represented by geographical and political borders. My future practice shall continue to mine this virtual environment, this liminal state, supported by the theoretical underpinnings of art history and art theory.