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Jennifer Crouch
Artist in Residence
Jennifer's work explores the notion of knowledge creation through making and how narrative imagery, instructional and ambiguous illustration, and craft practices play a role in communication and understanding. The fact that knowledge can be embedded in imagery and in fact that that knowledge can be produced by creating an image, underpins her approach to art-making.
She creates technical drawings, paints, weaves, uses glass casting and ceramics and often collaborates with scientists to explore the relationship between images and knowledge. Her fascination in craft is grounded in her intrigue at how creativity is used and how work/labour/collaboration are required to carry out scientific research and create art objects. The relationships humans form with inanimate objects, tools and machines by virtue of working with them is a topic that relates to the work she develops, and focuses the process of art-making in a more anthropological direction.
mosscrestBe Patient for the World is Broad and Wide
This painting was a response to the use of geometry in Edwin Abbot Abbot's satirical tale 'Flatland'. This piece features elements of anatomical art fused with drawings of the model Apollo 11 prototype engine which can be seen in the science museum
Her work as artist in residence at CABI is focused on developing a project with researchers that uses a pedal-operated dobby floor loom to weave a type of Fourier transform carried k-space used in biomedical imaging research. Rather than focus on the production of imagery (which is what CABI does best) the project approaches the process of creating a biomedical image by considering the fundamental physical concepts used in biomedical imaging research, the role of powerful mathematical tools and the (almost whimsical) role that impromptu ingenuity, fixing and making plays in scientific practice alongside the specialised craft-like skills Jennifer has witnessed researchers at CABI use on a daily basis.
The Moss Crest Project
The Moss Crest Project is a private commission about meaning, ambiguity and symbolism. It took four years to complete and explores the theme of transformation. The intention was to create an image that is effective on different scales, and deliberately use traditional and popular symbolism to encourage the viewer to try to decipher intention, interpret the piece and invent their own meaning in the process.
GLASS
Arrangement of glass and plaster - explorations of material interactions.
This project (called Precession) begins with imaginings of the proton and results in a woven tapestry representing MRI sequencing and k-space, which happens within what is sometimes described as the 'black box of technology'. Jennifer also enjoys asking CABI to take part in creative activities where possible, particularly at Christmas time where she and other members of CABI ask the group to make presents for each other, i.e. edible simulacra of other researchers or make something new from found items.
Jennifer is a qualified secondary school teacher (PGCE and QTS), tutor for anatomical drawing at Central Saint Martins, co-founder of the art-physics collective Jiggling Atoms, volunteer digital archivist at Cecil Sharp House and keen amateur radio enthusiast. She has a background studying physics and medical illustration and worked as medical artist at St George's Department of Anatomy between 2011 and 2013, carrying out drawing in the dissecting room. She has exhibited work internationally from New York to Iceland. She is also a member of the 2016 Arctic Circle Residency Autumn Expedition, where she will conduct work exploring indigenous craft and navigation whilst circumnavigating the remote archipelagoes of Svalbard between September and October 2016.
CABI + Data + weave draft
A section of a weave draft based studying what a fourier transfer does to co-ordinates. The beginnings of what part of the tapestry could look like
Dobby Loom
A photograph of the steel-cast dobby module of Jennifer's loom. The entire loom has a footprint of 2.5 x 2.8 m and measures over 3m in height. It makes a sound similar in rhythm to the 9T MRI scanner at CABI
LAND - close up
Limited edition RISOgraph prints produced to commemorate Jennifer's Arctic expedition.
Situs inversus totalis
During human development the internal organs of the chest and abdomen develop into an asymmetrical arrangement within a symmetric skeletal and external appearance displaying bilateral symmetry. Individuals with situs inversus is have their internal asymmetry of the organs of thoracic and abdominal cavity are arranged in a perfect mirror image of the expected (normal) positioning. This condition is extremely rare, and seldom bears any clear relation to medical complications.