As a female autobiographical artist who has suffered and witnessed suffering, I feel the psychological and physiological effects that art has. I understand its power.  Beautiful truthfulness and painfulness.  The peaceful, evocative, sensual, and sensations that are often not spoken of. I question Power and Control through the uncanny.

My works are presented as visual feelings and thoughts.

I am interested in how I have shielded myself from facing my past traumas and how I have 'lost' some memories. My practice is about recognizing my shadows' symptoms to begin to see what lies hidden and begin a process of healing. Reconnecting with childhood toys and toys that encourage me to make art, have informed and affected my art practice.

Perplexing questions of the beastly that co-exists with the beauty in humanity. The ever-present stench of injustice. The merry-go-round of power forces me to face my past and the choices I have subsequently made. 

To detach me from my shadows and shed light on them, I enter the depths of my soul. In my dreams, night terrors and visions, I travel. Observing the World through an unnatural lens.

Reverting my mind back-in-time and having a dialogue with my inner-child, I search for the toys I played with, some I kept safe and others I dissected. The rhymes and the games, the lore of the playground become audio-worms, stuck in my mind. The games we played, in the bedroom, in the cemetery the morbid in the occult.

With vintage drawing tools, I conjure. With voices I record.

For me, the magic of playing is to be absorbed by an alternative world.  I lost myself and grappled with my ever-changing identity.  The telepathic insistencies and spiritual encounters beguiled me and offered me a way out. Regressing, repressing and the timely appearance of the apparitions, the night terrors and exploding head voices. 

An intriguing sense of discovery meets the playfulness of the everyday.

I seek, I find, I discover and uncover. These hunted tools and sounds are brought back into my life, a sense of pleasing nostalgia with a quiet discontent. They offer loneliness, longing, satisfying escapism.

Abuse, violence and suppression - my art speaks out, for me, for sufferers gone whose stories may never be known, for those being subjected to trauma now and for those tormented soles to come. 

         Jennene Whiteley

Surreal Creative