Meet Jen Coon
Artist Biography
As a printmaker, Jen explores mark-making and imagery by using traditional as well as found or improvised tools and matrices, including carved woodblocks, polymer lithography, and monotype. She attends carefully to inking and sequence to manipulate color, value, and translucence while understanding the qualities and limits of paper. The results are unique works that celebrate a range of aesthetic choices from graphic rigidity to subtle atmospheres, often within the same piece.
Content choices tend to come from life experiences as embodied by natural forms, or sometimes language, carried by the desire to take on a wide perspective or to express continuum and transformation in nature and human relationships.
Originally from rural Western New York, she holds a BFA from the State University of New York at Purchase. As a young adult in the '80s, she came to question identity and social constructs at a time when manifestations of Queerness and “otherness” were more stigmatized and marginalized than today. This mindset continues to inform her searching, restless approach to process and point of view.
Jen has also studied at UNC-Chapel Hill and Penland School of Craft, learning the moku hanga woodcut technique from Master Printmaker Keiji Shinohara. She has exhibited at venues across the state, including the North Carolina Museum of Art, where she is employed with the Visitor Experience Department. Before that, Jen worked in the wine trade and as a sommelier; she holds the Level 3 Award in Wine from the Wine and Spirit Education Trust. She lives Raleigh, NC with her partner, Sophie, and their two cats.
Artist Statement
To design and develop a handmade print from start to finish is an exercise in hope, strategy, and flexibility. I love the combined demands of creativity and analysis required to define the surfaces, angles and edges that will hold or repel ink while curating my visual language and its web of associations.
The end result may be a flat but sensuous conjuring of a tabletop marked with fingerprints and cup rings; or a knotted nucleus of photos, pattern, or language. I especially enjoy appropriating found or household objects and clothing to play with human scale or to suggest domestic life.
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 cause physical change to the block, which then turns a print into a form of documentation.
I try to keep the process flexible enough to support replication (when desired) as well as risk-taking and discovery. I find the work to be an absorbing feedback loop that demands not only skill and ingenuity, but courage and poetic imagination.
- Jen Coon 02/2025
Image: Signature of the artist, Jen Coon