Meet Jen Coon

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Jen Coon combines traditional Eastern and Western printmaking techniques that incorporate oil- and water-based materials, often within the same work. She considers printmaking an opportunity to mine process as subject, while using wonderful tools and materials in actions that are human-scaled and haptic. Visual information is taken from nature or the built, usually domestic, environment and generally not manipulated except to address the image-reversal of the matrix. Process itself is often a subject.

Jen is originally from Western New York and holds a BFA from the State University of New York at Purchase.  There, she focused on figuration through drawing, painting, woodcut, and stone lithography. 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 far more 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.