Kelly discussing her residency at her closing celebration.
Bankside Hotel x Contemporary Collective were thrilled to welcome contemporary painter and textile artist Kelly Jenkins to the Makers’ Studio as their Artist in Residence. During her 5 week residency, Kelly created a range of free-hand machine embroidered paintings inspired by data collected from the environment around the Bankside on the Thames, the people that inhabit the area, and a few famous individuals who have fuelled her previous body of work created through the duration of the pandemic.
Kelly Jenkins is a contemporary painter and textile artist based in Hampshire. Starting from an interest in contemporary visual media, such as the internet. Her meticulously embroidered paintings reflect graphically the complex world we now live in. Her current series explores stitched data visualisations, where she reveals to us another way of understanding our reality and takes a critical view on human experience and existence. Combining paint and thread on canvas to create abstract embroidery paintings that are both atmospheric and evocative, Jenkins’ playful and organic ‘scapes’, are stitched into with highly detailed and dynamic embroidery compositions. Her process and aesthetic are marked by constant change and contradiction; Through the spontaneity and impulse in painting to the precision and texture of her embroidery, Kelly finds harmony in coalescing opposites, achieving dissonance and flow, unifying colours, shapes and textures through the relationship of paint and stitch on canvas. By juxtaposing the familiar sensibilities of the atmospheric Impressionist landscape and abstract expressionism with the aesthetics of the information age, creating abstracted landscapes of places within the cosmos of the internet, Jenkins references high modernism in the context of high tech; using data to visualise the online collective and personal experiences, memories and emotions of individuals and society.
