Kelly Jenkins

Royal College of Art (Master of Arts , 2004)

3 KEY FACTS ABOUT KELLY:
1) Uses beautiful, meticulously hand embroidered paintings to explore the world between dreams and reality with a contemporary fusion of painting, embroidery and the landscape of life
2) Before completing her Masters at The Royal College of Art, kelly achieved a 1st Class BA Honours Contemporary Textile Art. West Wales School of The Arts, Wales. 2002
3) Kelly was shortlisted for The Royal Arts Prize 2020

Kelly Jenkins is a contemporary painter and textile artist based in Hampshire. Starting from an interest in contemporary visual media, such as the internet. Her meticulously embroidered paintings reflect graphically the complex world we now live in. Her current series explores stitched data visualisations, where she reveals to us another way of understanding our reality and takes a critical view on human experience and existence.

Combining paint and thread on canvas to create abstract embroidery paintings that are both atmospheric and evocative, Jenkins' playful and organic 'scapes', are stitched into with highly detailed and dynamic embroidery compositions. Her process and aesthetic are marked by constant change and contradiction; Through the spontaneity and impulse in painting to the precision and texture of her embroidery, Kelly finds harmony in coalescing opposites, achieving dissonance and flow, unifying colours, shapes and textures through the relationship of paint and stitch on canvas.

By juxtaposing the familiar sensibilities of the atmospheric Impressionist landscape and abstract expressionism with the aesthetics of the information age, creating abstracted landscapes of places within the cosmos of the internet, Jenkins references high modernism in the context of high tech; using data to visualise the online collective and personal experiences, memories and emotions of individuals and society.