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Jenny Lee Fowler — paper cutting, drawing

The Arts Center Exhibits:

• 'Call & Response: Ann Staley and Jenny Lee Fowler,' Corrine Woodman Gallery, December 2011
• 'Jenny Lee Fowler and Terry Weiss,' Corrine Woodman Gallery, May 2010

Artist Statement:  A few years ago, I dared myself to cut a hundred traditional freehand silhouette portraits. These likenesses are hand-rendered by scissor directly into paper while closely observing living subjects. I invited my friends to sit for portraits in my living room and strangers to sit for portraits in airports and lobbies. Inspired by dusty old books like Shades of Our Ancestors: American Profiles and Profilists, I began to see these profiles, contemporary and historic, as cross-sections of specific people at particular moments in time -- "a moment's monument." I was later drawn to use leaves as a way of articulating the precariousness and fragility inherent in an art form that is often referred to as timeless. Like many things that we place such labels on (corners of the world of being), they're not so. The leaves in this exhibit were harvested near the banks of the Willamette Valley, from wild and cultivated plants in my mothers garden and are all a part of my own family tree. My paper cuttings invoke a relationship with the natural world as an extension of that family. They are small planets rich in flora, fauna, and folk.

Biography:

Jenny Lee Fowler fashions silhouette portraits in the tradition of the early American itinerant silhouette masters by hand cutting a likeness directly into the paper while closely observing a living subject in profile. Her paper cuttings brim with natural elements and vignettes from the little farm where she now lives with her family in the Hudson River Valley of New York State and her girlhood in Corvallis, Oregon.  Fowler's art has been featured in print and on-line in House Beautiful, Martha Stewart Living, OhDeeDoh, Elle Decoration South Africa, Craft. She has shown at Kingston Museum of Contemporary Art (Kingston, NY), Unframed Artists Gallery (New Paltz, NY) and the Percolator (Lawrence, KS). She designed a seed packet for the Hudson Valley Seed Library, created a town emblem and banners as an artist-in-residence for the Walking on Air Parade marking the grand opening of the Walkway Over the Hudson, and has sent paper cuttings to private and commercial clients all over the world.

Visit Jenny Lee Fowler's website.