Jean Blackburn

The home fascinates me because it is where we start. As we grow up, the things we surround ourselves with in our homes are deeply ingrained in us. Entwined in our everyday experiences, these objects and their surfaces, textures, and smells become rich with layered associations. Our early experiences act as templates that substantially shape future interactions and understandings. But this structure of understanding that we build as children is constantly tested and adjusted in dialogue with experience.

As a sculptor, and as a painter, my work examines the negotiation of cultural models and individual experiences in the domestic setting. I cull domestic objects and images that are commonplace but loaded with assumptions or desires. I manipulate them to suggest that they, like we, are in a process of redefinition. These objects have strong domestic associations suggesting familial relationships and situations. Materials grow into each other; new structures emerge at the cost of older ones.

I am intrigued by the carefully constructed, highly marketable models and domestic facades presented by home furnishing catalogs such as Pottery Barn, Crate & Barrel, Williams Sonoma, etc. Recently I have been scanning and blurring imagery taken from these catalogs. The images, though generic, are blurred to the point of only the simplest definition. To these, I add spare gouache brush strokes as possible interpretations or suggestions. Both blurred photo and painted line dance together on the edge of recognition, fragility, and doubt. The meeting of the line as figure and the photo as ground is dynamic and unstable. It is a kind of perceptual casting for apprehension of our experience in light of the models that are given to us. The boundaries of definitions interest me the most. I push my pieces until they are on the verge of a multitude of other possibilities.