Selected Earlier Works

Installation Shot from "Less" (2000) at Green Street Gallery (an amazing gallery that had its last show in 2006) Boston, MA, curated by the tireless James Hull. See also: http://www.greenstreetgallery.org/jenn.html

Lookout, 2001, 19" x 22", human hair sewn into paper

Lookout, 2001, 19" x 22", human hair sewn into paper

Container, detail, 2000, 22" x 30", human hair sewn into paper

Container, 2000, 22" x 30", human hair sewn into paper



Barrack #2, detail, 2000, 15" x 15", human hair sewn into paper

Barrack #2, 2000, 15" x 15", human hair sewn into paper

Barrack #1, detail, 2000, 15" x 15", human hair sewn into paper

Barrack #1, 2000, 15" x 15", human hair sewn into paper

Untitled, 2000, 13"x 13", human hair sewn into paper

Untitled, 2000, 12"x 12", human hair sewn into paper

Compound,detail, 1999, 22"x 30", human hair sewn into paper

Compound, 1999, 22"x 30", human hair sewn into paper

Artist Statement
In the fall of 2000 I traveled to the Island of Jersey in the English Channel where hundreds of Hitler’s Atlantic Wall bunkers stud the coastline. Some of them looked as if they had been built thousands of years ago, with their stepped “porches” and tomblike portals, and others were eerily futuristic. These beautiful and terrible fortresses became metaphors for personal and artistic issues that I was dealing with at the time: safety, fear, vulnerability, hatred, cruelty.

I reference the bunker forms by making schematic drawings on paper, and I then pierce the surface with a needle hundreds of times along the pencil lines. I knot individual strands of hair end to end and sew them into the paper or canvas. The hair creates bisecting planes that overlap and build up to create a schematic “drawing” which floats in a horizonless space. I am interested in representing closed, illusionistic rooms or spaces that hold memory. The fragility and visceral quality of the hair softens and humanizes the precise perspectival drawings of these imaginary fortresses, as it creates a play on scale and density.