Jennifer Whalley BA (Hons) Fine Art 2020

Jennifer Whalley’s work revolves around her personal interests in traditional female crafts, with crochet and knitting, Jennifer aims to bring the ideas of the domestic home and bring them into a contemporary setting. Inspired by the works of Anni Albers, Joannah Jackson and Ebony Patterson’s use of bold colours and patterns, Jennifer looks at playing with different colour combinations and experiments with different colours and processes, by doing so she learns different skills that keep the art of crochet going. The connotations of the domestic – family, comfort, security and warmth are key topics in Jennifer’s work.

Her more recent work explores the disruption of the normal everyday life, after the death of her father at the beginning of 2020, she explored the subject of bereavement in art to understand how others have responded to the ideas of death becoming a celebration of life and relationships. The idea of the handmade has become more important to her to deal with grief and the anxiety of moving on. The repetitive process of stitching has allowed her to focus her mind with the act of making becoming a form of therapy. Over the past few months, she has created a series of blankets, that documents her grieving process as well as continuing to bring feminine craft into a contemporary art setting. Using bright colours, Jennifer looks to bring some light and colour into a subject matter that is usually relatively dark and solemn. Jennifer uses the imagery of the blanket to represent being held and comforted for those that have lost someone and for those who are no longer with us.