Dartmouth, N.S., artist Alice Jennex made her most recent gallery show during her children’s naptimes, and she says that wound up influencing the work.
“I don’t think the work would have been made or wouldn’t be the same if I had made it pre-motherhood,” she says.
When Jennex began capturing daily self-portraits — busting out her watercolours during the lull after feeding her newborn or during her children’s naptime — she wasn’t planning on sharing the results.
The intimate, emotionally resonant paintings of her face — what she calls “the most vulnerable work I’ve put into the world” — were part of her journal, next to daily entries chronicling the many sides of motherhood.
So how did these private paintings and raw bits become the exhibition Chromatic States, on display now at Dartmouth’s The Craig Gallery, where some are blown up to supersized dimensions?
Jennex says as soon as she showed some of the paintings to fellow artist Meghan Macdonald, the small works on paper became something bigger, and the proverbial lock on her journal was blown off completely.
“I think that something I have always admired about Alice is that she is really great at maintaining some kind of practice that feeds her art practice,” says Macdonald. “When I first met Alice, she was really quite disciplined at keeping a journal every day, making these observations about herself and the world around her that I think was important to her work as an artist and as a painter.”
Macdonald adds that she liked the work so much that she encouraged Jennex to mount the work as an exhibition. What she found most interesting was how it explored the intersection of Jennex’s art practice and her parenting, “and how at this stage,” Macdonald says,”these two aspects of her identity are really bleeding together.”
But before they were hung on a gallery wall, these daily paintings had a more humble goal: to help Jennex balance being an artist and a mom.
“I decided to kind of think about how could I just maintain that creative act in my life every day, amidst all the routines that come with caring for other people?” says Jennex.
“Part of the process for this work was to sit down and give myself a bit of time to reflect and to write things down and just locate myself,” amidst the changes of the postpartum period. “It involved an effort to express and locate these experiences and put them into something tangible and be like, ‘This exists. It’s real. It’s a part of my experience,'” she says.
The portraits are a departure for Jennex, whose previous works were more large-scale, figurative pieces (Macdonald referenced older Jennex paintings “connecting figures of the self to landscapes,” while Jennex herself talked about an earlier series she did focusing on the poses swimmers made in action).
But it isn’t just new territory thematically. Part of what makes the exhibition Chromatic States so captivating is the way repetition and variation butt against each other. The same subject matter — Jennex’s face — rendered in a limited palette of 18 colours, captures the variations and subtle changes that a person embodies from one day to the next.
“I began to shift what I even believe is a self portrait,” says Jennex. “There was one day I remember where it was just a really heavy day, and I sat down and I wrote, ‘I’m a blob, like that’s it.’ And so the portrait really doesn’t have my features. It’s just a kind of abstract blob of colour… And I was like, ‘That is the most accurate portrait that I could make today.'”
Not all the self-portraits deal with the difficulties of motherhood, though, as Macdonald points out.
“What she chose to share is this glimpse into that daily labor and the experiences that she’s having in motherhood, which are at times very joyful, but there’s also fears and there’s sorrows too,” she says.
She adds that the works in Chromatic States feel, to her, like Jennex working out a way to both adapt to motherhood while also retaining important parts of her old self.
“I don’t know if this is how she feels,” Macdonald says, “but I see it as a way to keep a strong hold on herself — who [Jennex] is, who she was before children — and bringing that self into her new life as a mother, while so many elements of herself and things around her are changing.”
While time and material constraints — using minimal supplies so they’d be in easy reach while managing her children’s needs — created guardrails around Jennex’s project, it’s a classic case of constraints forcing creativity.
“Motherhood is providing the structure for this work… I need a structure, and that structure is really metaphorical in resembling life as a parent,” she says. “There’s just not all the options available to me right now, and it makes me be very particular and specific and work within that routine.”
Though the point, initially, was for Jennex to keep track of herself and her life in the midst of the busy-ness of raising a family, the exhibition turns the personal into the universal. Jennex says that she wants to challenge the idea of mothers as “stoic and natural at nurturing” and instead depict the aspects of motherhood that moms are reluctant to talk about.
“You’re like, ‘Whoa, where’s like, the raw, real, gritty, moments?’ that I think are really there but we feel like we’re going to be judged, so we don’t want to share them.”
She says that ultimately, she hopes people “can connect to that raw emotion,” and that while she may be the portrait subject, the show is “not meant to just be about myself,” but rather about the experience of motherhood broadly.
“I hope it might just help someone else feel seen or acknowledge a struggle or something they’ve met and worked through,” she says.
Chromatic States runs until Aug. 24 at The Craig Gallery (2 Ochterloney St.) in Dartmouth, N.S.