S C R O L L S

Referencing ancient manuscripts, Jenny’s ongoing examination of the scroll as a form started in formative years and was unintentionally rekindled in 2022 at the tail end of lockdown. These meditative works explore ephemerality, tone and the edges of impermanence. The scrolls are comprised of a layered poem committed to memory, text obfuscated deliberately by repetition.

Experimentation is integral to the artist’s process. Resulting from Jenny’s contemplation of what it means to have a more sustainable practice, materiality takes center stage and process finds equal footing with product. Pigment is sourced from readily available materials, ground by hand and mixed with binder.

Stanley Kunitz’s live in the layers not in the litter crossed Jenny’s mind countless times as she repeatedly scribed a different poem from an entirely different poet. During a season of isolation and uncertainty, the artist lost interest in drawing images and found solace in the rhythms of grinding pigment and making ink skate across dry paper one letter after another. She discovered that the process had its own music, a calm symphony drifting in the ethos that was sensed and felt in the body.

The ink on these ten foot tall scrolls (ten in total) is made from the ashes of a decade of the artist’s personal journals, embedding the work with material traces of memory, loss and transformation. What you see is grief made visible, a textual palimpsest and quite literal weaving of words upon words into oblivion. The artist questioned if committing a singular poem to memory could serve as a future anchor should she confront Alzheimer’s as her beloved Lola did.