Jen Harris

Welcome Jen Harris!

Weaving on: Collin
Joining us from: Cleveland, Ohio!

Tell us about yourself and what led you to the residency?

I work at the intersection of painting, drawing, textiles and installation, combining analog mark-making with digital vocabularies and handcraft to form queer pictorial spaces. I often use literal fragmentation – cutting up and remixing my own works – to explode binaries of depth/flatness and legibility/abstraction while exploring the shifting contours of the historical narratives and myths that color our perceptions of the world. In 2020 I began making colored pencil drawings that merge a grid structure with figurative imagery. The tapestry-like qualities of these drawings led me to weaving.

Have you had any previous experience with Digital Weaving or Jacquard?

I took Cathryn Amidei’s hands-on TC2 workshop in January. That was my first time throwing a shuttle (!) but I’ve since immersed myself in all things weaving and I’m excited to return to the loom with a much deeper understanding of weave structures.

Any goals for the residency you'd like to share?

My primary goal is to explore how I can use the TC2’s capabilities to translate formal ideas I’ve developed in my paintings and drawings into woven cloth. One way I plan to do this is by experimenting with combining multiple weave structures to create kaleidoscopic spaces and gestural marks. I’m also curious about how I might introduce improvisation to the digital weaving process, which seems to call for a fair amount of pre-planning. With this in mind, I prepared a painted warp with shifting color bands, to add some randomness into the mix!

See more of them on Instagram at @jenpharris and on their personal site www.jenpharris.com