ARTIST BIO:

Jennifer Leigh Harrison is a self-taught painter as well as a poet, psychotherapist and social worker based in Seattle.  Her work as a whole largely focuses on themes of movement and deconstruction in lyrical abstract form. Her organic composition is often distinguished by improvised layers of stripped surfaces that house texture, color, repetition, disruption, struggle as well as parody, whimsical, playful and imaginative moments. Her art is currently on display in and around Seattle.

ARTIST STATEMENT:

Many of us spend our whole lives running from feelings with the mistaken belief that you cannot bear the pain. But you have already born the pain. What you have not done is feel all you are, beyond that pain.  - Kahlil Gibran

Of particular interest to me is the collective experience of the human condition as both failure and triumph, that in times of deep struggle one may discover one's deepest gifts. 

My clinical work is immersed in the lives of people who seek healing from trauma and/or addiction, and are often in suicidal crisis. In these states, there is a fragmentation of losing connection to the parts of self that are imaginative, playful, light, flexible, forward-thinking. Resilience and methods of recovery have often been habitually buried, become dormant, rigid, hidden, or walled off. 

There is an act to provide a container for the dark and the light through a process of reclamation and annihilation that is visible in my process-- a holding of the opposites is the "mess on display" for the viewer to project their own unconscious experience. These gifts to be discovered and re-united reflect profound strength of the human condition that is housed in the collective psychic existence and essentially also the collective image of what unwittingly pleases or draws the eye. There is a story to tell.

My expressive work captures the deconstruction of the worn narrative, the fragmentation of psyche, as well as the layers that when pulled away reveal immense beauty, depth, chaos, intrigue, and a way forward.  These are themes primary in my profession as a psychotherapist and social worker, and difficult or limitating to convey as a poet. There is movement, destruction, and joyful arrival in the images that are emotional, playful, freeing, barren, or unwritten. This a creative process of both annihilation, reclamation and integration in a variety of imagined states.

Like the path of healing, my creative process can be chaotic, impulsive, exciting, contemplative, full of failures, setbacks, and surprising discoveries leaving much of my work scarred and weathered, yet indestructible in finished form.

I presently achieve this with acrylic paint and associated mediums, sometimes incorporating charcoal, ink, paper and wax. I manipulate materials with steel, cloth, knives, hard plastics, and my body -- rarely using traditional tools like paintbrushes. 

My paintings are both refuge and liberating space from daily constraint and emanate both my subjective and physical experience of being in the world.