Jennifer Shufflebotham Painting

Currently studying a Painting MA at Coventry University.
Work on the walls of The Pig and Tail in Birmingham's Jewellery Quarter.

Text taken from the New Art West Midlands Catalogue, 2015:

"The shifting qualities of memory are of primary concern to painter Jennifer Shufflebotham. After discovering a collection of 35 mm photographic slides in a family attic, she began to use these as starting points for paintings. The slides were taken in 1965 on a number of family holidays and Shufflebotham has layered and refocused them, building new, sometimes abstracted compositions from these vintage family images. Interested in the physical qualities of the slides as objects as well as images, Shufflebotham points toward the problematic disposability of contemporary digital photographs. When every single moment can be captured on a camera phone today, what value do these images hold? This question sits in relation to the context of photography in the 1960s which was expensive and therefore limited, and a very different kind of photograph to many of today’s digitally captured images that never even leave the screens on which they are displayed.

The French philosopher and linguist Roland Barthes wrote extensively on the role of photography. One of his ideas that Shufflebotham keenly investigates is how photographs can ‘block’ memory: that the photographic image can actually replace the memories in our minds. By working with found photographic slides and another series of paintings using scenes from new holiday photographs she adds a new layer of inquiry altering images that capture ‘real’ experience into reimagined narratives. These paintings therefore function in a similar way to memory: fragments are lost, details exaggerated, places and people misremembered.

Preparing to Dive Sandgate & Wigwam Whitstable (2014) particularly demonstrates these aspects of memory. One child’s face is blurred so much that his nose and mouth are lost and his single eye is a dark smudge, yet his hair is glossy and clean, and the top of his ear a dark pink, perhaps hot where he has rubbed it. Similarly Foremark Reservoir II (2014) provides us with an unsettling, painted sketch of two children, with smudges for faces at the side of a reservoir. Shufflebotham’s vividly colourful work Girls on Bridge – Amsterdam (2014) is based on a more recent photograph of the artist with her friends on a city break, but the themes are the same. She creates scenes where memories slide in and out of focus, where the viewer cannot be sure what might be truth and what might be fiction. The boundaries of memory, experience and imagination are muddled and mixed up. "



Exhibitions:

2015

'The Coventry University Drawing Prize
2015'
The Lewis Gallery, Rugby School 12. 03. 15-25. 03. 15
Atkins Gallery, Hinkley 15. 04. 15 - 07. 05. 15

'New Art West Midlands 2015' Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery & The Barber Institute of Fine Arts, Birmingham.
12. 02. 15 - 17. 05. 15

2014

'Hauntology' Pigeon, Burton on Trent

'Group Show' The Pod, Coventry.

'Free Range' The Old Truman Brewery, London.

'Cut Above' Coventry University Fine Art Degree Show, Coventry.

'Coventry University Drawing Prize 2014' The Lewis Gallery, Rugby.

'Half Cut' Coventry University Fine Art Half Year Show, Coventry.



Awards:

2014 - The Pod Studio Residency
2014 - Severn Trent Water Commission