Jennifer Field
As an artist, Jennifer Field is best known in Kansas City for the cut metal collages she began creating in the mid-1990s, evoking serene, fluid landscapes. The harmonious mergence of natural elements in her work, whether in combinations of cut metal or more recently in paint and experimentation with digital collage, is achieved through a process of reconstructing visual fragments to form a whole.
This artistic process reflects what Field describes as an ongoing “contemplative practice,” involving an attempt to break through the “conditioned” mind into intuition and imagination. While versed in Western classical artistic traditions by virtue of extensive European travel and a short period of study at the San Francisco Art Institute, Field does not attempt to reference established art movements or styles. Her work balances classical compositional symmetry with a more tribal, shamanistic vision of the Earth.
By fracturing then recombining core motifs of nature—clay, rocks, dirt, sand, fauna, water, sky, stars—Field enacts a unique process of clarification. She speaks of “art as medicine,” an antidote to academic, canonical standards of perception and representation. Senses of wonder and magic arise in her idyllic landscapes, recalling the enchanted beauty of Hudson River School paintings. Yet fluidity and harmony are achieved via intentional, systematic reordering of visual elements, invoking precisionist intuition as opposed to loose spontaneity.
Influenced by world religions, mysticism, and philosophy, Field was also inspired by Thomas Hart Benton, with whom she visited frequently as a child at his studio in Kansas City. Sinuous connectivity and unconventional perspective reflecting Benton’s style is evident, for example, in Field’s landscape, as the crow flies, a series of four contiguous cut metal co llages created for the 2003 Charlotte Street Awards exhibition at the H&R Block Artspace at Kansas City Art Institute. The continuity and large scale of that work, sharing visual tendencies with a mural, stands out as an ambitious example of Field’s metal collage.
The intrinsic quality of Field’s work, no matter what medium she employs, ensues from a broader practice that occupies her life. Less about the product than the process, Field’s concept spans beyond the physical object, existing more comfortably in a meditative space where her imagination can freely roam.
—Heather Lustfeldt
