Jen Greely

Jen Greely explores moments of unexpected or hidden emotion in everyday objects, expressing them through gestural line drawings, painting, printmaking, and site-specific installation. Thread, rope, sewn and drawn lines are integral elements of her work, exploring ties that bind and break.

‘Loose Threads’ is Jen Greely’s newest series of handstitched collograph monotypes. She merges three-dimensional thread into two dimensional paper, linking the past with the future and exploring the nature of time passing. Chine-collé adheres discarded and sewn fabrics onto paper, and seemingly defunct static-laden screens emerge in the image. This unsettling quiet imagery evokes a picture-space in which hand-sewn work is not yet done, or has unraveled, with loose threads casting moving shadows upon unchanging flat paper surfaces.

Greely’s ‘Knot’ series of hand-drawn, carborundum-printed and screen-printed knots is based on rope she discovers washed up on beaches. She documents these found lines before transforming them into simplified line drawings, carborundum plates, and silkscreens. These images explore concepts of time and place: these free-form shapes pre-existed her drawings, themselves having recorded unseen elements, tides or people. Through repetitive and rotated imagery, these drawn knots often anthropomorphize into human-like forms surreptitiously caught dancing, embracing, hiding, or fighting. By stripping the body of its human form and personal identity, but leaving intact gesture and interaction, these works express universal emotions and actions, all while referencing a hidden tangible past with origins in found objects.