Heidi Jensen

Muncie, Indiana

A thread running throughout my work is confusion of the animate and inanimate, an approach to form leading back to the Surrealists. We seek to establish order by creating taxonomies and groupings, fixing things in place. Yet, forces such as desire can destabilize and upend systems and classifications, resulting in new configurations. The elaborate neck ruffs that are the basis for the forms in these drawings may be perceived as feminine, though they carry a degree of ambiguity, they were worn historically by both women and men.

Circulating in these drawings are meditations on states of transformation and material culture. Buddhist teachings on desire inform this work; there is tension between these ideas and the beauty of the objects. The ruffs are contradictory; they are empty but give the illusion of fullness, they are volumetric but are comprised only of a sinuous, curving plane. The movement of the form is similar to a carousel, plunging up and down in a manner that suggests constant rotation and restlessness. In Wreathe, the dimly drawn ruff generates bright blue flames, reminiscent of both American hot rods and halos found in Buddhist painting. In Scatter, the ruff form is becoming undone, and bones are flung into the space around it.

I am entering these drawings into this exhibition because I thought the title of the show resonated with these forms, which have many complex planes and faces. With each new drawing in this series, I have to invent a new spatial logic. The flat, graphic flames and bones contrast with the illusionistic approach to the ruff forms.

Heidi Jensen is an Associate Professor of Art at Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana. Her work is based in drawing practices and explores narratives about biology, the functional and the decorative, and the feminine. Recent work has been shown at Utah Museum of Contemporary Art; the Abington Art Center in Pennsylvania; the Cluster Gallery in Brooklyn, New York; and with curatorial group Things Feel Heavy in Detroit, Michigan. She is a fellow of several residency programs, including the Millay Colony in Austerlitz, New York, and La Napoule Foundation in Mandelieu-La Napoule France.

10th Anniversary Message:

One summer, I was sitting inside reading, and I felt something crawling on my head. I reached up carefully because I didn’t want to squash whatever it was, or get bitten by something. It was a very large, bright green grasshopper. I took it outside, released it, and went back inside. I sat down and picked up my book. About ten minutes later, another large grasshopper was on top of my head. I have no explanation for this but it was very odd, and the second grasshopper was definitely not the grasshopper I had released.