Dejeneffe
Artist Statement
I work across photography, installation and painting to create evocative and immersive projects. My photographic work is made through utilizing studio sessions, found imagery and digital collage to produce beautiful but uncanny images based on the human figure. I have worked with botanical and landscape motifs as well as exploring images of bodily distress, transformation and transcendence. My main focus is on understanding the diversity of embodied life experience alongside the key universal themes that bring our experiences closer together: love, pain and fear. Within my photographs the subjects rise up in flames, emerge from ink and integrate with plants. Much of my photographic work is cloaked in a lush darkness, tapping into interior contemplation and subconscious thought, with several images set on front of a starry night sky.
My painting and installation work balances sensual mark making with bold, graphic, linear compositions. My acrylic paintings play with depth through areas of intense colour alongside increasing levels of more delicate hues, giving the effect of semi-opaque screens, distance and movement. There is a constant balancing act between the dynamism of geometry and the fluidity of more organic painted textures, which seem to flow across the surface. My large-scale installations are made in a variety of media chosen to align with the ideas within the work and past projects have been created in highly tactile materials such as inflatables, artificial fur and synthetic grass. I have also worked with sculpted neon lights to extend the angular elements of painted compositions out from the canvas into three dimensions.