About
About Jen Dixon
Jen Dixon is a visual artist and writer based in Birmingham,
UK. Her work explores themes of space, memory and cultural neglect, with a
focus on post-industrial Birmingham and the Black Country. Her artistic practice combines walking, archival
research, photography, collage, and creative writing.
Jen walks surviving, lost and imagined lines of the city's
past, documents the routes both visually and textually, and weaves alternative
narratives through these spaces in her work: stitching narrative and
memory through these fragmented spaces, forming something culturally resonant
from the scraps. In doing this, she takes influence from traditionally
"female" crafts and the work such craftswomen performed in the
passing down of narratives, and as acts of repair and restoration. This can be
seen literally in her “woven” collages which dismantle and repair landscapes, and
more figuratively in her photography which collects abstract patchworks of
light and shadow to reshape old narratives of industry into a new folklore. Jen
invites the viewer to consider not simply the physicality of space, but also
these ephemeral, intangible aspects, such as memory, nurture, and cultural
repair.
Jen's perspective is shaped by her family’s history working in Birmingham and the Black Country’s manufactories and mills. An ancestor wrote this of their mother, who worked in a Birmingham manufactory:
She was clever and industrious, and [...] was regarded as an excellent match for a working man. She was married early [and] became the mother of eleven children: I am the eldest. [...] She had children apace. As she recovered from her lying-in, so she went to work, the babe being brought to her at stated times to receive nourishment. As the family increased, so everything like comfort disappeared altogether. [...] She made many efforts to obstain [sic] from shop work; but her pecuniary necessities forced her back into the shop. [...] I have known her, after the close of a hard day's work, sit up nearly all night for several nights together washing and mending clothes.