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.

Note

My current work focuses on portraits of decaying Agro-Industrial complexes. Specifically, I am working with the Farr’s Feed and Grain complex in Ault, Colorado. I am interested in the near-sublime nature of its size as well as how decay exposes the fragile side of a seemingly indestructible man-made object. I seek to represent the beauty that is found in the various states of decay and disrepair amongst its inner-structures. I believe that light is the vehicle that reveals the forms of the complex and then translates it into color, geometry and texture. These formal elements create a portrait of the complex in its current state. The intention of this type of portraiture is to show the beauty that can exist in the decay of these larger than life structures.

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.