So far the artists that I have featured as part of my Amplify project have been good friends of mine, or at the very least Facebook friends. But I gain inspiration from many artists that I don’t know and never met. Today, I am expanding the project to include someone whom I have followed for quite some time online — someone whose work I have admired, but someone whom I’ve never met.
Today’s Amplify artist is Philadelphia-based artist Jen McCleary. Jen is a versatile artist and creates mixed media work, digital collages, jewelry, and wheel thrown pottery. I first came across Jen’s art on Instagram, most likely from looking at a variety of mixed media art and journal art. It was her art journals that first drew me in, and the time-lapse videos of her working in her journals inspired me to create my own time-lapse, Journal Friday videos. I love seeing her process. She works in a much different way in her journals than I do in mine, and it’s always interesting to see a fresh take on the process.
Art has always been an important part of Jen’s life, and by high school she knew she wanted to be an artist. She studied painting and printmaking at the Tyler School of Art of Temple University, and it was during this time that she discovered her love of mixed media and book art. After college, she ended up working in the field of academic publishing, but continued to pursue her art. After going back to school, she became a graphic designer for a local university, and eventually was able to go freelance, giving her more flexibility with her creating.
No matter the medium, Jen approaches her work in a very similar way. She works intuitively as she pieces together disparate images, patterns, and materials from her collection of ephemera and odds and ends, fitting it all together in a cohesive work. She invites play and discovery into her process, and allows the work to evolve as she works. The juxtaposition of images, shapes, and patterns creates work that is visceral and symbolic.
Of all of Jen’s work, I am most drawn to her mixed media pieces where she physically pulls together an array of fragments and pieces to create something that suggests narrative and story, but the ambiguous nature leaves that story or narrative up to the viewer to interpret and form.
Along with her more traditional, hands-on work, Jen creates digital collages with that same feel. Though she originally disliked digital art, the possibilities of Photoshop won her over and led her to change her mind.
Repurposing and reusing of objects, images, and materials is an important part of Jen’s process and is probably most evident in her jewelry work and her ceramic work. With her jewelry, she combines found and vintage objects with imagery and mixed media to create one of a kind wearable art. And in her ceramic work, she doesn’t simple create functional wheel pieces. She creates the pieces and then alters them through decoupage and kintsugi, the traditional Japanese art of repairing broken pots with gold and lacquer to create something different and unexpected.
Though Jen doesn’t deliberately set out to create a certain piece with a certain meaning, there are themes that run through her work. In her artist statement, Jen describes some of the dualities that she explores in her work and specifically mentions light/dark, man-made/natural, and complexity/simplicity. I would also say that her work explores deconstruction/reconstruction, universal/personal, and cosmic/earthly, as well as others.
I hope that you enjoy Jen’s work as much as I do, and of course, you can find out more about her and see much more of her work online.
Website: https://www.jenmccleary.com
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/JenMcClearyArt/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jenmcclearyart/