Jenny Brown is visual artist living and working in Providence, Rhode Island, whose primary mediums are drawing, collage, and works on paper.
Jenny studied art at Bennington College and received her MFA from School of Visual Arts in New York. She was a featured artist in the recently released “Craft Companion-The Handmade life,” published by Thames & Hudson, and has participated in art events and pop exhibitions for retailers such as Anthropologie, Kate Spade, & West Elm. Her work is currently shown at Collier West in Brooklyn, NY, Good Eye Gallery in Los Angeles, CA, and 13Forest in Arlington, MA.
Statement
Jenny's work brings to life a mythical world of sea creatures and stars, realized through her love of paper ephemera. Her recent collage works focus on a dream of representing harmony amongst different elements of the natural world (flora, fauna, the sky, the sea).
An abundance of florals in the works represent the hearts and souls of her fantastic creatures. Their branches and tentacles share a yearning to be connected to the most basic elements of life which created them...water, minerals, and the stars.
"in search of sun cups at night"
We spent a lot of time debating whether or not the blackened landscape was beautiful or horrific. My opinion kept changing daily. I had gotten the idea to put my bright blue wool socks on one morning… I thought they might cheer me and everyone else up, but I was wrong. Even in times like these, quick fixes are still quick fixes, and I never wore them again. I think everybody knew there was nothing to be done but to take stock of our new surroundings and accept them. Nobody really wanted to be there, what choice did we have?
Exhausted, we spent long days dusting snow off the frozen ground and trying to dig holes in it. I was put in charge of maintaining an abandoned free-standing chimney that must have been attached to a house at one time. One day when I was wading through the bramble that had grown around it, I decided to stick my hands in the opening of the chimney to see what I could find… I pulled out a curious collection of items: a frozen and dried lime, a dirty sponge, some nails, a hairbrush. I wasn’t sure what to do with them or why they were there… I had hoped for something simple… a bundle of photographs, maybe a book? I spent long hours lining the objects up on the ground in different orders and looking at them to try and figure out how they fit together.
Night time was spent making escape plans, though we all admitted our new world was almost beautiful in the dark… the sky was always starless and velvety, and the remnants of the forest became a charming menagerie of tunnels and hiding places. Fact was nothing but fiction in these moments and we sometimes were hesitant to sleep because we didn’t want to miss looking at our surroundings in the night light. It was the only time I felt calm and hopeful. As the sun rose each day, we found ourselves silently wishing that all that imagined beauty from the night would really be before us.
