Bio:

Jennifer is an acrylic and mixed media painter living and creating in Airdrie, Alberta, Canada. Her creative work mirrors a special connection with the natural world and explores ideas about her identity as being deeply linked to place, specifically the prairie landscape where she spent her childhood. She has a fond affinity for all plants ‘wild and weedy’ and enjoys hunting for wildflowers with her family on their 20 acres of native prairie.

Jennifer began exploring the visual arts in early childhood, later earning her B.F.A. in painting at the University of Saskatchewan in 2002. After a nearly 15-year absence from art-making, a challenging period of transition in 2016 inspired Jennifer to honor and embrace her identities of artist and naturalist.

Her current ongoing series of work entitled Belonging to the Land focuses on Jennifer’s place-identity connection with the native prairie landscape as expressed in her paintings through mixed media, energetic mark making, and a riot of abstracted color.

Statement:

I was grown from the prairie and everything in my creative practice leads back to those roots. As a child growing up on a grain farm in the vast grasslands of Saskatchewan, I spent much of my time wandering outside alone, quiet, observant, and introspective. Those formative moments fueled in me a deep identity-connection with the landscape and everything within it. During those years, I also formed a proud identity as an artist, influenced by the somewhat unconventional cultural experiences provided to me by my family, which allowed me to feel unique in our conservative rural community. The concept of place-identity first began to influence my artwork as early as my fledgling oil painting practice at the age of eight.

In my current creative pursuits, I continue to be drawn to the subject of the prairie and my relationship to that landscape. My feelings of belonging and oneness with the prairie environment are reflected back to me in the artistic process. In my artwork, I translate my observations of the landscape into inventive color, reactive mark-making, and expressive energy in an attempt to portray the magic of reciprocity between my identity, the landscape, and my art.

My current artistic practice is focused on an ongoing series entitled Belonging to the Land in which I explore this land/art/identity connection first in sketchbook musings and later in finished acrylic and mixed media paintings on canvas.