Meet Jen Coon
Artist Biography
Jen Coon is interested in printmaking as a means of exploring mark-making (beyond drawing), the physical role of sequence in layering, and the special receptivity of paper. The results are unique works on paper that have much in common with painting.
In serial monoprints, Jen combines techniques from handmade traditions where pigment is suspended in either oil or water, then applied to blocks or plates and transferred onto paper. This process is immersive, demanding, and open-ended, and invites both spontaneity and precision. She enjoys working out the technical challenges as well as the imaginative possibilities that come with making impressions from the tangible world.
Originally from rural Western NY, 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 (even more) stigmatized and marginalized. This mindset continues to inform her searching, restless approach to process and point of view.
Jen studied printmaking at UNC-Chapel Hill and Penland School of Craft, where she learned the moku hanga 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 in Visitor Experience. Before that, Jen worked as a sommelier and holds the Level 3 Certificate from the Wine and Spirit Education Trust. She practices art at Blam! Studios and lives in Raleigh, NC with her partner, Sophie, and their two cats.
Artist Statement
To design and develop a print is an exercise in patience and imagination on so many levels. I love the intimacy of carving a block while minding the grain, the angles and edges that will determine the way they hold and carry ink, the rigors of registering multiple images in alignment.
The end result may be a sensuous, graphic conjuring of three dimensional surface (a tabletop marked with fingerprints and cup rings -- and the emotions that may be carried along) or a more complex conjuring of ideas through pattern, language, photography; I particularly enjoy appropriating found or household objects and articles of clothing to bring familiarity (or strangeness) and human scale.
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 then becomes documentary.
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