Maggie Jennings – Vivificante

Maggie Jennings – Vivificante. 8-21 July.

Exuberant, colourful and vibrant, Maggie Jennings’ work celebrates the energy of living things. She works with the vigour and dynamism that she perceives in the world around her to produce strong, sensuous images.

This exhibition is the narrative of her life, and shows the stories and passions which she would like to share with you.

Her fascination is with the state of being and living: beginning with recalling the enchantments of her childhood in Devon, lying in long grass or up a tree watching animals, birds and insects lead their idiosyncratic lives. She has travelled extensively, and has taken workshops in Zimbabwe and Namibia. She was awarded a scholarship in Greece, and a printmaking residency in the Canary Islands. In Tenerife, she worked under blue skies with fragrant breezes and surrounded by brilliant blooms. This set the mood for her art career. The Tenerifians taught her a favourite word – Vivificante (life-giving, inspirational), the title of this show.

She is never without a sketch book and uses her visual diaries rather than a camera to record her travels and experiences. She will be exhibiting a series of these tiny books alongside the larger works in this exhibition.

Whilst all forms of printmaking fascinate her, the main body of her work is in the form of spontaneous, gestural mono-screenprints, painted directly through the mesh, leaving no room for correction and indecision. Her book “Fine Art Screenprinting”, published in 2015, describes these and other methods.

In her recent work, Maggie focuses on her home town London, scaling down and making more intimate works: etchings of buildings and crowds of people, made precious with hand painted papers and gold dust.

Maggie trained at Bristol (BA), and at Chelsea (MA). She teaches printmaking part-time at The Royal Drawing School and Heatherleys School of Art, and lives locally near Hornsey Lane.

During the exhibition there will be talks on the artist’s work on Sunday 10 July at 11.30am and
on Sunday 17 July at 3.30pm. Maggie will be in the gallery throughout the exhibition.

Gallery open Tuesday-Friday 1-5pm, Saturday 11am-4pm, Sunday 11am-5pm (3pm on Sunday 10 July) ; closed Mondays.