Jen Hitchings

Jen Hitchings' work depicts surreal landscapes in monochrome, drawing correlations between ambiguous natural environments and interior psychological spaces. The scenes reference visuals of the artist's personal history growing up in an American suburban town prone to flooding. Through her imagery, Hitchings comments on modern land development failures and water management techniques—one aspect of her work's larger focus on the tenuous relationship between humankind and nature. The connotations of flooding in general are vast, from Biblical tales to dream interpretation, which she employs to conjure psychological implications and metaphysical narratives. Much of the flora is inspired by both the American Northeast and the rural Japanese landscape - a residency at Studio Kura in 2014 immensely impacted Hitchings' experience of the human relationship to land. Combining such species and spaces, she aims to evoke notions of global interdependence and collective consciousness.

Depicting hills, trees, suns, and moons that are doubled, mirrored, and organized into patterns, the works elicit an awe-inspired portrayal of our environs. Teetering between ominous and serene, the resulting images hold an uneasy place in the mental landscape. Since 2020, the work further investigates the artist's interests in Eastern philosophies, linguistics, merging the body, mind, and landscape, and early methods of tracking time based on observation of celestial objects. Allocating meaning and creating systems to understand the natural world—often in regard to how it serves humans, and at any cost—is an effect of consciousness that Hitchings finds fascinating particularly in today’s technology-driven world.