The Reading Room with Jennifer Nieuwland

I am a London based artist, Dutch by nationality. I spent my formative years in Italy and I was mostly self-taught before embarking on an MA in Fine Art at City and Guilds of London Art School in 2021. This resulted in a marked shift in my practice, which now focuses on bodily memory and its intangible, sensory register. Within this I investigate notions of trauma and catharsis and explore the female body as a site of pain, production and ambivalent tensions. This year I have curated and exhibited in Stretch at Somers Gallery (London) and Corpus at Hypha Studios (Farringdon). My work and related writings feature in Ache Magazine 2023, a publication that explores the gender pain gap through art, poetry and short extracts.

 

These readings and recordings delve into the inextricable relationship between the mind and body and the sensations or ‘affects’ that are felt deep within, which are often hard to verbalise or describe through language alone. They approach the mind/body relationship from different angles; science, philosophy, art, materiality. In Mark Johnsons book, The Meaning of the Body, he contends that the mind and body are both ‘matter’, we are made of flesh and it is through our bodies that we feel, think, move and create meaning with a complexity beyond our conscious understanding. Other books explore notions of bodily pain and trauma and how these ineffable experiences become ‘stored’ in our physical makeup and affect the way we perceive, feel and react to the world around us. Personally, I am interested in unearthing these stored experiences through paint. I ask myself; how can a form manifest an inner state? And, how can paint embody and activate sensation? For example, the sense of contraction and expansion during birth or the prickly, fizzy yet numb feeling of pins and needles or the sharpness of a paper cut. Some of the media content investigates the potential of paint to evoke the complex, visceral workings of the body and the nervous system. Lisa McCosh argues that the material of paint mimics our fleshiness and through its immediacy it enables the artist to unlock felt experience and to embody this through form, texture, sheen and mark in a process of co-emergence.

 

Other readings explore the works of Francis Bacon, Philip Guston and Dana Schutz and their development of a visual language that captures complex physical and psychological states. Overall, my reading list points to the importance of bodily awareness in an age where detachment, precarity and instability are pervasive and anxiety and mental health issues are rife.