jennifer helen meanley

artist statement


My work depicts spaces and moments of reflection. The most recent collages and prints are striated by light and color which function rhythmically and luminously. These elements denote places of reverberation in which people and animals appear and reappear in various permutations of themselves and in which the landscape rolls out like a botanical wave. The figures are contemplative. They look slightly beyond the world of the viewer. They gently prod at orbs of light, reach to touch the legs of an unseen individual, or lock arms as though guarding the space behind them.

These pieces are equally about memory and about the ways in which its residues potentially accumulate and entwine. Here, memory is imagined as a space of dense growth. Birds sing silently, but with familiar voices. Color might register as a known variable, depicting the smell of the soil in the spring or in the fall. The figures, often pieced together from fragments of a single origin, suggest a span of growth and of time.