Riverbed | Rain | Flow — JENNY PHILLIPS

Riverbed 1 & 2, 2021 (sold)
Encaustic, Mulberry Paper, India Ink
48 x 12 x 1.75 inches (each)

Inspired by California’s weather extremes of drought and flooding, the riverbed series evokes California’s parched creeks, which contain a memory of past flowing water and the promise of future rain. The work is created by taking strips of recycled paper, soaking the edges in India ink, and then running the ink-saturated edge across mulberry paper to create marks. The mulberry paper is then cut and embedded in encaustic ground. The contrast between the geometry of the composition and the freeform shapes of the ink is a subtle reminder of the forces of flow and geology that have shaped California’s landscape.

Ground Seams 2 (sold) and 1 (available), 2021
Encaustic, Mulberry Paper, India Ink
60 x 24 x 1.75 inches (each)

Beneath our feet, tectonic plates shift and push the earth. Where the Pacific plate subducts the North American, a wrinkled, folded Bernal Hill was formed. Ground Seams alludes to the dynamic formation of land and it’s constant erosion. These ink-soaked gestures evoke rhythmic movements quietly fractured. In the dark deep blue of early morning light, the images speak to geologic change and the bedrock where earthly forces meet.

Chert & Fold 3, 2021 (sold)
Encaustic, Mulberry paper, India ink
22 x 30 inches

Walking Bernal Hill, I notice how the natural world is intertwined with the human-built environment. Pipes emerge from and reenter the earth; fences become one with brambles; paths connected and overlap with one another. I particularly love a wall of sandbags that has become fossilized over time. Chert & Fold explores the embedded textures of this place as well as its insistent movement. Using discarded paper, I swipe ink across a porous surface that absorbs the gesture, exposing a geologic underlayer that captures a conglomerations of element from the hill.

Chert & Fold 1, 2021 (sold)
Encaustic, Mulberry paper, India ink
22 x 30 inches

Walking Bernal Hill, I notice how the natural world is intertwined with the human-built environment. Pipes emerge from and reenter the earth; fences become one with brambles; paths connected and overlap with one another. I particularly love a wall of sandbags that has become fossilized over time. Chert & Fold explores the embedded textures of this place as well as its insistent movement. Using discarded paper, I swipe ink across a porous surface that absorbs the gesture, exposing a geologic underlayer that captures a conglomerations of element from the hill.

Chert & Fold 1, 2021
Encaustic, Mulberry paper, India ink
22 x 30 inches

Walking Bernal Hill, I notice how the natural world is intertwined with the human-built environment. Pipes emerge from and reenter the earth; fences become one with brambles; paths connected and overlap with one another. I particularly love a wall of sandbags that has become fossilized over time. Chert & Fold explores the embedded textures of this place as well as its insistent movement. Using discarded paper, I swipe ink across a porous surface that absorbs the gesture, exposing a geologic underlayer that captures a conglomerations of element from the hill.

At Stake, 2023 (sold)
Encaustic, Mulberry paper, India ink
40 x 40 inches

Fog and Faultline, 2021 (sold)
Encaustic, Mulberry paper, India ink
64 x 24 x 1 5/8 inches
De Young Open, 2021

Although they occur on vastly different time scales, weather and tectonic activity have together shaped the California coastal landscape and the City of San Francisco. They act as creative as well as destructive forces, and Fog and Faultline hints at the dissolution of forms into weather or into the earth; evoking both chert rock and urban forms discolored by fog and dislocated by fault lines.