Jennifer Brakefield
untitled
Worn hands across my earth
white-wash my thoughts.
There is nothing to dig for
Here.
But-
I am speaking in rust.
Still, you hear my words as if they are alive.
My bones are rusting eternally.
layers become dust
cakes my lips
mutes the burn of your light
pulsing through the cracks in my frame
where I cannot stop the wind.
Breath across my broken glass
cuts through dust from years of solitude.
It strips bare the walls that I have built
and let stand,
exposed
to anger,
fear,
necessity.
Jennifer is a transplant to Colorado from Maryland. Her artistic interests started early in her life by her grandmother who did watercolors and invited her grandchildren to join her. Jennifer began doing watercolors and drawings in elementary school and uses the mediums currently as a means of intuitive recording. Her pursuit of art and creativity has been consistently supported by her parents and extended family (many of whom are also artists).
As a 2009 graduate of the Maryland Institute, College of Art Jennifer was able to make the most out of her intuitive drawing skills. The work she produced during this time focused on charcoal expressions of landscape. Her thesis work revolved around a 3’ x 30’ drawing that depicted a valley in the Shenandoah’s. Fluctuation was a stepping stone for her. The sheer size was a key element in her formulating her current style. It had the symbolism of natural processes and the sublime nature of landscape but it was missing something. It wasn’t until she moved to Colorado that she realized that these type of buildings are still a huge part of a modern landscape.
We no longer have the luxury of depicting landscapes without a human-based structure as we have sprawled out into the wilderness with such fervor we are now hard-pressed to find virgin landscape. Colorado’s gigantic agricultural buildings offered a way to combine her love of landscape and her new found interest is sublimely sized functional buildings. While working on her MFA at Colorado State in Fort Collins, Jennifer explored the idea of these buildings as landscapes themselves. In this process, she became intrigued by the physical nature of them. This lead her to her current work which explores the natural physical decay of agro-industrial buildings.
Most of Jennifer’s work focuses on industrial buildings that are used for primarily for agriculture. Her work focuses on the beauty that is found in the colors and the textures found in the breakdown of these larger than life buildings. Her earliest work was a struggle to find a way of depicting the breakdown, the intent of the building and the way it commands the landscape. Eventually she found that by focusing solely on the subject and not its surroundings she could express what she was feeling about these particular buildings. This cropping allowed her to get right to the point. This is also when she moved back to creating larger pieces that command their space in a room.