Jennifer A. Cohen

Lives and works in Alger, WA

Artist statement

My art practice is quiet, contemplative, and ritualistic. As I walk from home to my garage studio, I take in my forested surroundings through all senses. Upon entering, I ring a brass bell three times as a reminder to surrender my thinking mind. When I leave, I ring the bell again and touch silicone sculptures fixed to the doorway as an act of gratitude for life and creativity. Driven by sensorial curiosity and a desire to honor the unseen, I explore vulnerability and inner landscapes through sculpture, painting, video, photography, and poetry. Materials I use reflect a tension between my reverence for the natural world and fascination with the synthetic. In my paintings, gnarled black ink lines, often made blindly, create hollow landscapes inhabited by bleeding, pooling color. These marks function as a personal cartography, tracing and navigating internal terrain. This somatic exploration extends into sculpture, where painted rhythms become physical form. Raw surfaces evoke skin, bone, and earth. Bare plaster forms lashed together quietly emanate a sort of bodily grief and often contain small, obscure cavities. Swaths of garish silicone envelope or cloak plaster, rock, and concrete. Video, photography, and poetry further expose internal experiences and moments from past and present. Across these mediums, sensorial encounters become tangible traces that move through the same shadows, absences, neuroses, and forms of containment present in the paintings and sculptures....

Artwork