Jen P. Harris

Lives and works in Cleveland, OH, USA

Artist statement

My loom-paintings are both painting and weaving, and they resist fitting neatly into either category. Each piece begins as a traditional painting might, with a stretched canvas and layers of paint, which I transform into a simple loom by hammering nails across the top and bottom, installing a warp vertically across the painted surface, and weaving horizontally with hand and needle. The hybrid nature of each loom-painting emphasizes the slippage between painted and woven elements, forming a dialectical space in which the two meet to conjure shifting bodily and spatial subjects. Some works, like Night Swimming (2026), articulate this transformative exchange through tension: woven shapes tug on vertical warps to reveal slices of the painted field below. Optical vibration also plays a role, playing with our perception to propose a fluid field of vision and meaning. The work engages with traditional textile practices, historical painting lineages, and the graphic language of drawing, bringing an intuitive approach to image-making into conversation with a technical approach to tapestry weaving, a visceral understanding of color, and a cartoon-like use of line. In holding these various modalities in tension, the loom-paintings collapse clear distinctions and binaries, privileging fluidity as both visual and philosophical condition.

Artwork