Jennifer Douglas' work references the working environments of heavy and light industry and their painterly equivalents within the history of modern and contemporary art. Recent paintings on canvas reference both the Buchi and Tagli (holes and slashes) of Lucio Fontana, and more specifically refer back to the artists aesthetic revelation at the battered, drilled and overpainted walls of an abandoned factory in post industrial Teesside (an area of Northern England subject to successive years of economic decline and dis-investment since the 1980’s).
Read MoreUsing proletarian materials such as industrial floor paint or carbon paper (a redundant material she associates with her Grandmother’s generation of women working en-masse in typing pools for the civil service) Douglas creates serene monochromatic canvases which she then works ‘blind’ - repeatedly puncturing and scratching the surface to create works that are both violent and painterly and refer back to the accidental beauty of toil and labour. A recent shift in her practice sees Douglas inverting this order of materials, using gold and silver leaf to cover her surfaces, and then using chemical reactions to destabilise and heavily tarnish the works creating paintings that resist the symbolism of wealth and point back, earth-bound, to the elemental properties of materials and their inevitable decline.
Jennifer Douglas was born in 1975 in Amersham, UK. She studied Fine Art at Newcastle University and completed her MFA at Glasgow School of Art in 2005.
Exhibitions include Crab Walk, NGCA, Northern Gallery for Contemporary Art, Sunderland, UK; Confusion in her eyes that says it all, Maria Stenfors, London, UK; Tip of the Iceberg, Contemporary Art Society, London, UK; From Acanthus to Zebrawood Cooper Gallery, University of Dundee, UK; Beijing/Glasgow, Museum of the Central Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing; Exit Strategy, Tramway, Glasgow, UK; The Games we Play, Barcsay Sala, Budapest; VANE Export, Tensta Konsthall, Stockholm, Sweden; You Shall Know Our Velocity, Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead, UK. Her work is represented in collections such as The Government Art Collection UK; Tyne and Wear Museums Collection, UK. Simmons and Simmons, UK
Jemnnifer Douglas lives and works in Gateshead and Newcastle UK
