Jen Coon works on paper using traditional printmaking methods, combining Eastern and Western approaches by using oil and water-based materials in the same piece. She brings sensitivity to materials, strong carving and printing skills, and strategic layering to her prints, which are often complex compositions that evolve and recombine elements. Jen has a longstanding interest in expressing haptic and emotional information through the figure itself or the implied figure.
Having grown up in rural Western New York State, surrounded by small farms and rolling hills, Jen's appreciation of nature comes through in her work as organic shapes, colors, and relationships and through her choices of matrices, often wood. Additionally, she is tirelessly curious about the mark-making potential in everyday objects, such as bicycle tire, crochet, pastry blender, bubble wrap, table, crib, and clock parts.
Jen studied at the School of Fine Arts at State University of New York at Purchase, graduating with a Bachelor of Arts degree in painting and drawing. Her experiences at art school established lifelong work habits of meditative attention, self-reflection, and aesthetic rigor. She also credits her Purchase experience with fostering an understanding of the expansive potential of self-expression: "I was encouraged to question identity and social constructs at a time (during the '80's) when manifestations of queerness and otherness were stigmatized and marginalized. I think this lives in my practice as a searching, restless approach to process and point of view." (JC)
She moved to Raleigh in 1987, and later studied at UNC-Chapel Hill and Penland School of Craft (notably, with master Keiji Shinohara in the moku-hanga technique). As a member of the NC Printmakers Guild from 2001 to 2009, she exhibited at colleges and art venues across the state, and recently has shown her work at the Village District Library and the North Carolina Museum of Art. She holds a studio at Blam! on Kinsey St. and lives in Raleigh with her partner, Sophie, and their two cats.
It exercises my imagination to design and develop a print; to carve a block or ink a surface in such a way as to generate a particular mark, which then is puzzled into a composition. It exercises my problem solving skills to take advantage of an unexpected result, which is known to happen in printmaking. The end result may be a sensuous, graphic conjuring of 3-dimensional surface (the appearance of a tabletop marked with fingerprints and cup rings -- and whatever emotions that may carry) or a more complex evocation of ideas through pattern, language, family photographs, or articles of clothing.
I want to find out what can happen in this moment of recording a surface; what presence or action can be implied or postulated. The actions of preparing and pressing an object can raise ideas in and of themselves. These forces can cause physical change to the block, which allows for a documentary approach. I keep the process methodical enough to support the opposing goals of repetition and exploration, which typically results in serial, related monoprints. I find the work to be an absorbing feedback loop that demands not only skill and ingenuity, but courage and poetic imagination.
- Jen Coon 3/2023
"...Everything she does is so deliberate and well-crafted..., in the quality of the inking, in the presswork, in the attention to the surfaces Jen chooses to print. Invariably, these bear the marks of life. They have lived as wood, been used as crates, or tables, been worn as clothes, as skin. They are skin. Jen [captures] in ink these everyday surfaces... through the tactile equivalent of a kiss. I have accused Jen of wanting to print everything, but what I mean is, everything in its ongoing daily-ness. It is as if she were determined to keep a diary in the form of prints."
-Cartographer, Denis Wood
Jen Coon_Artist Biography_Artist Statement_July 2023 (pdf)
DownloadImage: Signature of the artist, Jen Coon
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