Meet Liberated Artist Jen Denzin
On God, Apples, Swiss Alps and Chairman Mao
The best thing about working at an art gallery is that I get to work with artists. Not only are they all brilliant, but also they are kind, which, as I have written about in the past, is important if you want a creative career in a rapidly changing and notoriously-hard-to-make it field.
Jen Denzin is one of those artists. She regularly drives me home at the end of the day after she dazzles the minds of young students at the Gallery. Because she and I have spent so much time either in her little Prius (always brimming with interesting art supplies) or on the train, we’ve become kindred spirits. But, anyone who hangs out with Jen probably feels a similar connection. You want to go to the thing when you know Jen will be there. You can wonder with Jen, ask naughty, dumb questions and laugh spectacularly, belly aching, childlike laughter with tears roll down your face. I often find myself laughing so hard with Jen, and usually we’re completely sober, cracking up while discussing, say, someone’s unfortunate mispronunciation of an obscure body part.
Late last year Jen agreed to let me interview her while she drove me home. Now, she has an upcoming exhibition at Newcastle Art Space on June 14th named after a line from Dante’s Inferno, “Since here the way was broken.” This exhibition is made up of all new, never-been-seen-before Jen Denzin material.
She, myself, poet Jo Lynch and musician Rosemary Ponnekanti are gathering in Carrington this coming Saturday to celebrate art and poetry in the mangroves too.
This week’s Substack seems a perfect time to share some of the pearls from our 26 minute car convo last year.
“It's hard being a full time artist, honestly. You always have to have another job. You either have time and no money, or you've got some money and no time,” she says.
Jen has quit art several times but then finds herself signing up for an exhibition or getting excited about something.
”Like it or not, I am an artist. I just can't switch it off. I'm obsessed. Really,” she says.
Jen grew up out west. She was born in Sydney, but spent her childhood in a tiny town called Canowindra.
”It’s near Orange,” she says. “But they grow apples in Orange, not oranges. There's no oranges. I think it might even be the apple capital. I can't remember what kind, which is terrible.”
Growing up, Jen ate a lot of apples. Living in the country influenced her practice. If you wanted to get anything done, you had to do it yourself.
”We were pretty resource-limited. I had to grow up without a community about us. The first time I visited an art gallery I was 18,” she says.
Despite her limited exposure to art, she knew she loved it.
”When I was 10, I took a painting by numbers, and I was completely obsessed with the Swiss Alps. That's all you could get,” she says. “I would just be in this country town, in a drought, painting the Swiss Alps.”
Jen didn’t have a lot of art supplies as a kid and now she regularly works with what’s lying around.
”If I get a lot of something, it's like, oh, well, I'm gonna have to make something with this, because I've got lots of this now. Sometimes materials dictate what I make,” she says.
After high school she went to a progressive “grassroots-y” bible college where she worked on a cotton farm and lived in the community. She had big dreams of moving to China, but first she moved to Newcastle to learn Chinese. Here she met her husband at 22. They quickly got married and eventually they made it to China and taught English for a year.
”I was doing Australian-Chinese Foreign Relations and really interested in modern Chinese history, so I was putting my feelers out there for possibly following a bit of an academic path. But after I lived in China and returned, I realized that a lot of that interest had to do with Chinese art, and Wei Mao Zedong manipulated folk art and loaded it with political meaning,” she says. “In China, people are really resourceful as well. They'll just make art out of anything. So I feel like I kind of added to what I'd already been doing when I was younger. ”
Her aesthetic changed significantly when she lived overseas. In China the color red and the material plastic entered her practice as she began to notice both.
“All this lovely, glorious plastic junk. And I just loved it. I love them so much. It was just bright and cheery, powerful. Sometimes I’d just jump on a bicycle and go and check out all the little junk shops which often sold practical things. From that point onwards, too, I started mucking around with plasticwear,” she says.
After a year in China they moved to Australia’s South Coast and Jen went to art school.
Jen’s chosen medium is sculpture assemblage and installation. She started off making sculpture, but she didn't like plinths, so she opted to hang her art instead.
The first big installation she ever did was called Argo Pacifico at the Lock-Up with artist Oliver Harlan, who now lives in the States.
”We didn't know each other, but the two of us together: wonderful, insane combination. We just did whatever we wanted to do. So we decided to not have an art exhibition, but to convert The Lock-Up into a cruise ship stuck in time in the Bermuda Triangle; there was a mystery to it!”
The pair went bananas. It is one of so many wonderful examples where Jen willingly gets carried away.
One thing that makes Jen unique among my Australian friends is that she is Christian. She works at New Lambton Baptist Church where her husband is the pastor. I’m not particularly religious, but I was raised very much so. Almost everyone I knew in South Carolina was some flavor of Christian. When Jen and I talk about faith and God I transcend space and place. I move backwards and forward.
We agreed that in Australia it’s a very uncool thing to be Christian, but that’s why she likes being one.
”I think about the fact that I've been given something, and I want to give it back to God. And every single work is essentially connected to my relationship with God and my understanding of God,” she says. ”I don't have to please anybody, but God, so there’s total freedom. A lot of what I tend to make is joyful enough. There's a deep joy in my relationship with God, and I can enjoy doing whatever I want to do, because God, he's the only one I have to please. It's totally liberating, really.”
Talking with Jen is totally liberating. I love every chance I get. I can’t wait to see her art in Throsby Creek this weekend and at Newcastle Art Space in June. I love how she thinks and I love who she is.
It's true that Orange is the apple growing capital of NSW, (along with Batlow).
“I would just be in this country town, in a drought, painting the Swiss Alps.” What a totally sustainable way to cool down :-)