Jen Coon combines traditional Eastern and Western printmaking techniques that incorporate oil- and water-based materials, often within the same piece. She considers printmaking as an opportunity to mine process as subject; and a way to engage with beautiful tools and materials in actions that are human-scaled and haptic (touch-centered). She does not manipulate information digitally or photographically except to address the image-reversal in printing from a matrix.
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 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, household objects, 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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