Bio
Jennifer Lord is an artist, researcher and taijiquan teacher. They received their MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and their undergraduate degree from Naropa University. Lord was a 2024 Rough Gems curator at Union Hall for their exhibition Dirty Abstraction. They study and teach T’ai Chi Ch’uan with Rocky Mountain T’ai Chi Ch’uan. Lord has been a resident at Mountain Water, a land restoration project that combines contemplative practice with creative expression. They are always reading several books concurrently. Born in Salt Lake City, they live, work, and teach in Boulder, Colorado. Their work is held in several private collections.
Follow them on Instagram @juniperlord
email: juniperlord at gmail dot com
Artist Statement
I’m an inter/transdisciplinary artist working mainly with fiber-based materials and sculpture in installation with a background in painting. I collage and manipulate fiber based materials to create 2D or 2.5D compositions, which are works in low relief that move off the wall and into space. Through careful looking and combining, I bring multiple, sometimes disparate and unlikely things together into conversation. Through this combination, my work generates a feeling of harmony using color as a formal and structuring element.
Utilizing patchwork or collage as a speculative technology, I seek alternative meaning(s) and more just future(s), though a material method that is both aspirational and grounded. By examining women’s traditional art/craft practices through a queer and feminist framework, I explore how expanded techniques and concerns of materiality open up ideas of possibility as well as how meaning is embedded in material choices, processes, techniques and decisions.
My work centers beauty, and by that I mean care, by which I also mean life / livingness / liveliness / lifeness as located in conceptions of home: a shared space, a site of the shared possible. The most personally political, the home is a site where the group co-creates their conditions. It is a site of shared responsibility and shared freedom; yet it is also a site of precarity, especially when extending the meaning of home to include the Earth. I mobilize these contradictions of “home” in my work as a potentially radical site to realize utopian longing. The work addresses our shared responsibility toward human caused climate change and to mending the destabilization of our home.
Painting Statement
Speculative Abstract Rainbow-scapes. A shimmering aesthetic.
an expression of the aliveness and harmony of the natural world cultivates a felt sense of beauty in myself and in the viewer.
simultaneity as a visual method and theoretical philosophy.
humanity, a radical interdependence with the living Earth.
climate change, natural and environmental disasters, and the epicness of nature
representation and abstraction, gesture and description, chaos and harmony.
why/how is the world (so) beautiful? And why are we (Western, late capitalist, death-worshiping culture) destroying her with such abandon?
Jennifer Lord 