Original Ceramic Tile Artwork, framed

Jennifer’s passion for creating ceramic tile artworks featuring a range of quirky characters started 9 years ago. These tile artworks form part of the “CONNECTIONS” series, reflecting themes of social connection, the joys of friendship, communication and human interaction in day-to-day living. It explores the things we have in common, while also celebrating the diversity and uniqueness of each of us individually. The quirky figures are drawn from imagination with inspiration taken from day-to-day life – community events, markets, live music, cooking demonstrations, catching up with friends, dinners out oat local restaurants, theatre productions, drinks at wine bars, festivals and art exhibitions.

With the arrival of the pandemic in Australia in 2020, our lives were altered significantly, and our connections were impacted. In response to these changes, Jennifer’s tile artworks have evolved, becoming more textural, subdued, reticent, and the figures more moody and distant. Her approach to working in clay draws closely on her training as a painter and printmaker, with each hand-made clay tablet replacing a canvas or page from a sketchbook. Working in clay offers a lot of complexity to the creative process, allowing layers of exploration through drawing, texture, line-work, colour and a variety of finishes. For Jennifer, this creative process bridges painting, drawing and printmaking with no guarantee of how the final piece will materialise out of the kiln after two firings. For the INTERIOR exhibition, Jennifer not only created a series of ceramic tile images, she translated many of these pieces into acrylic paintings on canvas, allowing her to draw out further expression and emotion in her figures, use stronger layers of colour and also to work on a larger scale. The result was a large body of paintings and ceramic tile artworks which formed part of the exhibition “INTERIOR: Reflections on a Pandemic” with fellow artist, Michael Rowe, held at Mildura Arts Centre from 20 June – 1 September 2024.