About Jenna Tatham
Mother Expressionism
Personal statement
In painting, skin, bark, yonic forms, flowers, and landscape exist as one living field, unfolding in perpetual motion. It embraces elemental beauty over perfection, seeking to honour the raw intelligence beneath form rather than the flattened, consumable image of the feminine. People exist as trees: individually shaped, rooted, and perfectly imperfect. I see the canvas as an energetic mirror, an inner landscape that is simultaneously an expression and invocation of transformation. I am drawn to dichotomies and to moments of spaciousness in which seemingly opposing emotions or multiple states of consciousness can coexist. Through layering, erasure and dissolution, I allow paintings to hold these simultaneous states, creating possibilities that interact with the consciousness of the viewer. Myth, symbolism and religious imagery recur throughout my practice. Rather than viewing them as primitive attempts to explain the world, I approach them as sophisticated languages capable of expressing realities that exceed ordinary speech. Water is a recurring metaphor for surrender and metaphysical unity. All forms arise from and return to the sea, moving through continual states of becoming.