Jennifer Nieuwland
Eruption
Oil on Canvas
2022
‘Eruption’ seeks to evoke the ambivalences in the experience of early motherhood, both physical and psychological, a felt event that is at once painful and humorous, playful and sinister, immense and intimate. The breast acts as a metaphor for motherhood, hence its centrality and luminosity; a landmark, a source, a guiding light. It manifests an energy, a rippling sensation which spreads towards a glowing, raw nipple. Thick veins branch upwards culminating in an eruption which sprays into the night sky, the flecks of paint seemingly turning into a blanket of stars. There is an unsettling darkness below. Through formal and material play, the painting explores the weirdness, soreness, intensity and darker aspects of breastfeeding but also the magic, beauty and sense of release within it.
Jennifer’s practice explores physical and psychological experiences rooted in bodily memory. It seeks to reflect a visceral encounter with the world and to evoke intense, non-verbal affects, to capture that which cannot be contained by language. Meaning is manifested through metaphor, symbolism and the paint itself.
The ‘body’ in the work, is an ambiguous form that acts as a signifier for affective states. It stretches, drips, contorts, bleeds, reacts; potentially both architect and victim of the world it inhabits. Her bodily forms sit in ‘landscapes’ that reflect internal psychic and sensory states. As a whole each painting becomes a physical and psychological site, layered with different emotional and symbolic registers.
She is interested in the potential of paint to embody a felt experience, to encode and activate sensation. This reverberates in the marks, sheens, colours and textures laid in the paint. The material is variously pulled, scratched, scumbled, flicked, thinned, thickened. By encouraging the formal incidents in the work to morph and cultivate her images, the logic of her narrative is disrupted, enabling new meanings to emerge.
In playing on the tensions between beauty and horror, the child-like and the abject, she attempts to achieve a charged sense of ambiguity.
