Jennifer Mawby
I carry the bold and impulsive mark making of drawing into all the mediums in which I work. This includes painting, monotype printmaking, sculpture, bas relief, video and sound. Vivid colour is used as a seductive and psychological tool while the strong, mostly female characters I depict are grounded in allegorical and archetypical storytelling. In recent profile portrait artworks, I’m interested in using the convention of portraiture to fill in lost narratives. In particular I am interested in the stories of women left out of history or pushed to the side as minor characters. The use of a profile is highly significant as it has been borrowed from coinage, ceremonial medals, and architectural bas relief. The portraits are of characters invented during my spontaneous drawing practice and are titled with a one sentence short story which I think of as a very short story for minor characters. The literal place of women throughout history is also alluded to through the relationship of my work to architecture expressed through the way in which I place and choreograph the work together for presentation. My tablet sculptures are from the same world as my figures and represent an alternative and biomorphic way that personal devices could have developed as personal talismans for specific functions. Drawing is the cornerstone of Jennifer Tazewell Mawby’s interdisciplinary practice. Her works are idiosyncratic and often humorous with pictorial worlds and narratives crafted from content gleaned from history and myth, and stolen from data science and social media. Mawby’s work has been published and exhibited in Canada, the U.S., Australia, and the U.K. Jennifer is a Director and a co-founder of Vantage Art Projects (Vancouver, BC). Jennifer holds an honours Masters of Fine Art jointly awarded by OCA and University for the Creative Arts (UCA) in the U.K.
