Jennifer Mawby
Jennifer Mawby's large-scale, vivid pastel drawings, paintings, and sculptures are driven by two primary motivations: responding to contemporary lived experiences and engaging in alternative world-building to connect her personal history to the ancient past and speculative futures. Employing stylized and abstracted figuration, the artist offers social commentary from psychological, anthropological, and feminist perspectives. Using the portrait as a stage, she sets borrowed or invented characters in dialogue with timeless archetypes, animating and giving agency to the figures through energetic mark-making, occasionally punctuated by cartoon-like imagery for emphasis.
Mawby develops the content of her work in narrative cycles, often simultaneously, akin to a filmmaker. These generative, ongoing bodies of work inform each other and express shared themes, each existing within its own distinct world. Uneasy about ahistorical tendencies in contemporary culture, she employs mythmaking and worldbuilding to underscore the interconnectedness of the past, present, and future. This guiding philosophy extends to her studio practices, embracing digital tools like AI rendering, machine learning, and 3D printing alongside traditional analog techniques such as ceramics, drawing, and monotype transfer prints.
Her commitment to community building, dialogue, and collaboration finds expression through her involvement with P2P, an artist-run curatorial and research collective, and Vantage Art Projects, a nomadic venture collaborating with fellow artist organizers to realize exhibitions, written works, and publishing projects.
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