Artist’s Statement

My work is abstract. My work is the synthesis of how I experience the world. I am absorbing, listening, hearing and watching everything around me. These observations and experiences are too complex to simplify into one recognizable, realistic image. Abstraction allows the viewer to see my work how they want to see it or interpret it how they want to interpret it. There is ample room for interpretation or plenty of space for poetry, if you will.

When I draw something I am pulling together ideas, references, feelings and concepts from various experiences. It’s almost as if everything is waiting in the wings to be collected or orchestrated into one brief moment. The creating is somewhat ethereal as the way composers  or dancers do. Ideas and emotions are captured all at once.

I intuitively create and photograph landscapes, cityscapes and figures. All of these things inspire me. More specifically, I am fascinated by order, chaos and dynamic systems. Chaotic systems share two features of being fundamentally simple and yet being unpredictable and unrepeatable. Chaotic systems are dynamic systems sensitive to initial conditions. Each point in a system is closely related to other points. Even a small change in the initial conditions can set off events that appear to be random. Order is the energy that comes out of a chaotic event.

I photograph evidence I find of order, chaos or complex systems. I find these patterns almost as an anthropologist would do. I am curious to find examples of systems that seem to tend towards order and others that seem to tend towards chaos.

When I create my drawings, I mimic the conditions of a chaotic and/or an ordered state. I create a set parameters with paper size, frequency of material use, timing, blind drawing, visual references, etc. With these parameters I set the conditions so that when I draw a line and then draw another and another, the visual events ‘co-mingle’ and ‘co-exist’ and create a new order and new structure.

My goal is to continue to create images that have the appearance of being random but they actually have their own order. The key point in all of this is that I aim to take myself as an artist and self-critic out of the picture. There is almost no room for the artist and her ego in this process. The goal of this process is to allow the images to speak for themselves and breathe on their own. Hopefully, I am only there to help my work find their own state of balance and rest where they need to.

Jenny P. Mikesell
Daejeon, South Korea
April 2015