Artist Profile Jennifer Leigh Harrison

Harrison’s vibrant chromatic fields challenge violence with courage and honest emotion.

Artist Statement

Harrison’s embodiment of rage comes out in wild gestural slashes, as in the painting 1689 that enumerates in violent and chaotic order the number of documented women murdered by an intimate partner in 2021. Coined by the UN as “a shadow pandemic”, the death marks were made by house rags, representational of domestic place and how women are treated as beneath a system still in need of legal codification and national surveilance. The colors represent different marginalized groups and embody a stereotypic feminine beauty and order in this unforgettable memorial of the documented women who died.

The artist works entirely on the floor, drawing connection between living bodies and the land, noting that in a society where women are being beaten and killed, the land and the environment at large remain vulnerable to the oppressive forces that do not value either of them. The quadryptych ‘Rewilding’ houses destruction, chaos and an ultimate regenerative image of renewal and rebirth, while still housing the scars, as Harrison makes a statement about repairing the earth and healing the body.

As an activist, social worker and psychotherapist, Harrison sounds the alarms on visibility being a major driver of treatment and prevention. Her large paintings and installations create an atmosphere of this reality being in one’s face, documenting the irony of only what was municipally reported in the 2021 data, while understanding so much remains untold. Harrison is well aware of the challenges women face when they do have the courage and means to speak up, violence being a repetition of intergenerational transmission in families and larger systems. Women who speak up often face discrimination and barriers by the very agencies employed to help, not to mention legal, societal, health and financial risks that put them in greater danger for further abuse, homelessness, and suicide.

Harrison ultimately calls for change through the power of seeing, in what at first appearance are bright paintings that communicate optimism and hope, but symbolize her alarm call for all the women walking around who you never knew were going through the violence sublimated in this body of work, and the taken lives that color these walls.

Artist Biography

Jennifer Leigh Harrison is a Seattle-based interdisciplinary artist, social worker and psychotherapist who works with performance art, installation, critical essay, poetry and painting.  She is known for using her intuitive body and raw emotion to create large scale gestural abstract paintings that are thought provoking. Through an intersectional ecofeminist lens, she invites the public to consider the impact of hegemonic systems on gender and ecology while exploring themes of collective and interpersonal trauma, attachment, invisibility, power, resiliency and resistance. Her work often challenges worn narratives and false binaries through improvisational acts of violence, deconstruction, play and chaos that allow for regenerative discoveries that parallel the challenges and opportunities of healing both body and land.

In her oeuvre Hystérie: Architectures of Confinement, her large scale painting Rewilding was the culmination of intense physical hours on the floor layering, stripping back, and running paint through a needle-nosed application that created a still scarred and destructed, but transformed image of new beginning in response to the sublimated rage Harrison explored in her figurative and abstract paintings as part of the exhibit.

Author of the chapbook, Places We Left, published by Dancing Girl Press, her writing has been a subject in her solo exhibits.