Artist's Statement for Jennifer J. Woodward

The three C's of my work are conflict, contradictions and childhood. Fairytales and their frequently macabre life lessons are always in the back of my bouncy brain. Bubbling under the surface of my images are issues of identity, labels, desire, restriction, power, beauty, self-censorship, taboo, duration, immediacy, repetition, ritual and the search for meaning and compassion. These issues are both contemporaneous and interminable. I am interested in exploring that which is strange and yet familiar, what Freud describes as “the uncanny”.

I work in varied media, but at the end of the day I always come back to my first love- drawing. Drawing is woven into the tapestry of my art and life and it remains a safe place for me to explore not so safe emotions and thoughts. I am intoxicated by the immediacy of placing a silvery pencil mark on a surface.   Equally engaging is the way in which lines connect and overlap to form images.   No matter what medium I am utilizing, I know that drawing is the filter through which I see.

Process and product are of equal import to my studio practice.   The making of a thing is a kind of therapy, and the thing itself must be visually and conceptually engaging.   Each piece that I create is an opportunity to discover something new and old about myself, and my work.   When all is said and done I hope that my art raises questions for the viewer, and if I'm lucky, engages both the heart and mind.

Currently, I am creating a mythical family anthology comprised of fairy tales.   These visual stories are based on the lives of my loved ones and are to be presented as a series of large-scale video installations.   My choice of the fairy tale as a means of presentation came to be because I do not simply want to present an historical account of their lives, but rather to create a fantasy world that speaks via broader symbolic forms.   My process begins with traveling with my subjects to physical locations where they have lived.   Once there I will interview my subjects and draw out iconic moments from their memories; touchstones that can be woven into a larger thematic framework.   After forming visual narratives based on these journeys I will create a series of video fairy tales as a response.  

I hope to travel to Bitburg, Germany with my mother, as she attended high school there while living on the American Air Force Base.   With my Grandparents we will visit Springhill, Louisiana, where they both grew up, fell in love and eloped.   There will also be a trip to Burlington, Iowa with my partner, as he lived there for 18 transformative months in a kind of self-imposed exile.    My own self-reflexive and evolving tale subverts classical cannons in an effort to challenge established gender and social hierarchies.   I hope to re-visit my childhood homes in the tiny East Texas town of Henderson.    Further travel may take place as my projects takes shape, as I want to leave room for the unexpected.  

In my created tales I plan on highlighting the therapeutic use of fairy tales to confront our individual and collective fears.   I cannot however promise happy endings to my postmodern tales, as I do not want to reduce the intense complexity of life into a convenient moralistic box.   Instead I will leave room for ambiguity and contradiction in an effort to challenge the viewer to re-conceptualize their idea of what a fairy tale can, and perhaps should be.