Fideles Oculi – Jennie Jewitt-Harris
28th July 7th October 2018
Private View: 27th July 2018 6-8pm
Her intricate drawings, assemblages and collages express what influences us over life-times, using metaphors such as driftwood drawn with pencil and charcoal to echo the time-based disintegration of physical matter, woven with the more permanent media of contemporary collage. Her works embody personal histories somehow frozen in time and depicted as new ‘living’ entities of their own. We are left questioning where life ends or begins, what makes a life alive or a death an end. How time can move or stop and how we exist outside of time when passing through to the other side of the twilight veil.Jennie Jewitt-Harris is an artist working with the concepts of time and mortality in relation to the physicality of the contemporary world and those within it. As a Doctor Jewitt-Harris compassionately utilises her experience in medicine in addition to her role in the support of organ transplantation to investigate the relationship of attachment to a person’s own organs after death, specifically the eyes, the ‘windows of the soul’. Jewitt-Harris tells stories of experience across time and from person to person, memories of relationships had and those to come, snapshots of where life and death meet at the juncture of the passing of an organ from one human being to another.
Jennie Jewitt-Harris studied Fine Art at UCA Farnham, and shortly after was Artist in Residence at Watts Gallery/Artists Village. Jennie is currently researching for a PhD in Fine Art Practice having received the Watts/UCA Scholarship. She is investigating the relationship we have with our eyes that results in many people refusing to donate their corneas after death. Jennie combines her art practice with her role as a doctor, as CEO of international charity Transplant Links.