CURIOUS
THREADS

IMPRESS Printmakers Studio and Gallery

134 Kedron Park Rd
Wooloowin 4030
Brisbane
10AM – 3:30PM Daily

Opening: Saturday 22 February, 2:30PM – 5:30PM

Memory’s horizons

Penned for the Curious Threads catalogue by Beth Jackson

Jennifer Long’s artworks float in this tidal zone of perception where images and objects from the external world collide with internal memories and imaginings, stories and symbols. They are the gnawing evidence of her invisible progress to our unknown future.

The printmaker believes only in traces and in the effacement of those traces. Long conjures the enigma of the presence of absence, casting mnestic traces like nets to haul in … sometimes seething masses of things or bodies, sometimes only a few broken bits … always begging for some kind of recognition.

There are no original images – only layers of process, reaching forwards and back - scratchings on metal plates, incisions in wax, chemicals, inks, fibrous papers pressed through beds of felt, impressions passing from one state to another. Long’s works, dormant with latent energy, inhabit a twilight world where layers accumulate, shadows invert, forms are entangled.

Mimicking the machinations of memory, Long’s cloudy works invite us to retrieve and salvage, ascribe and construct, erase and release. Their significance hovering just out of reach. Vestigial images and image fragments, veiled and stained, conjure fragile worlds in states of transition.

Figures piled together in vessels journeying, birds captive and free, abstract structures that are somehow both foreign confinements and makeshift shelters, wild swirling spaces of sky, ocean, and fields, upheaving events of war, fire, flood, and storm – Long intersects inner and outer worlds charting a course to no-place. Wholeness and belonging remain elusive, there is no permanence, and the works push on to far horizons.

Forgetting and forgiveness are memory’s horizons. Propelled, perhaps even plagued, by the need to be faithful to memory, and to be reconciled to the past, forgetting and forgiveness offer ultimate solace and appeasement. Forgetting, so often thought of as a weakness, a lacuna, threatening the reliability of memory, is for Long, memory’s ally. Long’s works depict memory’s endless negotiations with forgetting, the balancing acts which are our present moment of invisible progress, that which allow us to be together.

The artist of collage and construction sinks deeper into fragments and recombination. Prints are torn and soaked, molded, stiffened, and waxed to form vessels, curls and hollows. Or lain flat, stuck and stitched together with found objects. Collage is full of edges. These works of rescue and retrieval, of pattern and play, trace the introjected lives of others - real, yet rendered inaccessible. Fragments of unknown origin become new treasure. The togetherness that Long generates – eccentric, eclectic, careful – and operating beyond recognition, forgives all.

Long, as book maker, further contains the free flow of her forms and ideas into bound progressions. We must hold these works, become their container, balance them in our hands, connect to and journey through them. Some of them fold out, forming their own far horizon - their narratives, open-ended and approaching. The book as embrace.

Long’s artworks, gnawing into a fragile future, are hopeful. This is not a naïve hope that simply wishes things were better. Long’s hope is fierce, perhaps radical. It is forged from acknowledging the malignant cultures and entangled experiences of harm – historical, personal, environmental, familial – and gently laying them bare. Her art is a salve for wounds of all kinds, and brings beauty where there was none.

Beth Jackson
February 2025