About

The artist and historian Jen Dixon leading a history walk along the River Rea in Birmingham.


A B O U T   J E N   D I X O N

Jen Dixon is a visual artist who interweaves elements of photography, collage, walking practice, archival research and writing. She has a BA in Visual Arts (First Class Honours) and a MA in History (Distinction), and produces both creative and academic work. She is interested in spatial narratives and layers of history in the landscape, especially in the West Midlands.

Jen threads lines through the landscape, following both surviving and lost lines in post-industrial Birmingham, the Black Country, Staffordshire, the historical Forest of Arden, and beyond. She takes influence from traditionally female crafts and the work such craftswomen performed in passing down stories, 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 “Dark Waters” photography which collects abstract patchworks of light and shadow along the canals of the West Midlands, to reshape old narratives of industry into a new folklore.

Jen also works collaboratively with communities, engaging individuals and groups of all ages in walking practice, heritage and archives, and artistic making. She encourages people to be curious about the places they move through every day and to engage with their surroundings. 


P H O T O G R A P Y

C O L L A G E
~ Woven Landscapes ~ Brutal ~ Interchange ~ Viaduct ~


C O M M U N I T Y,  W A L K S,  W O R K S H O P S  
T A L K S  &  P U B L I C A T I O N S

O T H E R

  • Committee Member for the Centre for Printing History and Culture at Birmingham City University (2016-2018)
  • Committee Member for Centre of West Midlands History and Culture at University of Birmingham (2015-2020)



My work is influenced by my family’s history working in Birmingham and Black Country manufactories and mills. This is a description of Elizabeth Levett who worked in a Birmingham button manufactory, written by her son:

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.