Artists Statement - Jennie Nayton

In my artwork I explore how we can use our interaction with the environment to pull our awareness into the moment of now. The ‘now’ referred to here is not one moment in a stream of moments but stands alone as an awareness of the self outside of time and space. Through an experience of ‘now’ paradoxically we can experience eternity.

I combine photographic prints of natural phenomena (such as water or clouds) with geometric three-dimensional structures, which have been worked into the print material by cutting, folding and expanding. Each expanded form has a relationship to the subject of the print. These combinations share an argumentative relationship. The expanded forms are complex but completely comprehensible. They are sharp and hard edged with defined limits. The water images are fluid and indefinable. But there is a relationship which can be intuitively grasped; this is a link of patterning, the connection between a single unit of the expanded form and a ripple of water. This relationship between the definable and indefinable echoes the difference between our perceptions of space/time and its unknowable reality.

A short biography

Jennie combines elements of photography and sculpture together in her unique artform which is based on techniques of origamic architecture. She graduated in 2004 from Curtin University with a Bachelor of Arts (Art) with Honours. Since then she has held two solo exhibitions and has won the 2007 City of South Perth Acquisitive Art Award. She is has been a finalist in a number of group exhibitions including the Off the Wall Feature in the Art Melbourne Fair(2007), Art Brisbane 2008 & Art Sydney 2008 as well as the Fremantle Print Awards (2002, 2006 & 2008), the Sydney Art on Paper Fair (2005), the City of Joondalup Invitation Art Award (2005, 2006 & 2008) and the City of Perth Photomedia Award (2006). She is included in a number of state and national collections including Parliment House Collection in Canberra, Artbank and the State Libarary of Queensland, she is also represented in numerous private collections across Australia.