Jennifer Falck Linssen
Jennifer Falck Linssen is a sculptor. Trained in the ancient Japanese traditions of katazome and katagami, she combines the precise and painstaking process of katagami-style paper carving with metalwork to create both pedestal and wall sculpture. Jennifer continues to practice the traditional art of katazome as well - this time on paper, creating contemporary hand pulled prints and art books with original haiku text.
She is a student of movement and the transience of nature, exploring the beauty of line and its interaction with light and shadow. Her work is hewn by years spent on the high arid plains and the open sky of Colorado's Front Range, and it is shaped by contrasts of place. Linssen's new studio is a return to her origins. She's surrounded by the quiet beauty of dappled light and the soft sounds of the forest in northern Wisconsin.
Linssen's work has been exhibited in galleries, universities, and museums including solo exhibitions at the Los Angeles' Craft and Folk Art Museum, the Springfield Missouri Art Museum, and Myrtle Beach's Burroughs-Chapin Art Museum amongst others. Her sculpture is featured in numerous publications including Southwest Art Magazine, the Los Angeles Times, and the Surface Design Journal.
"My sculptural vessels and low-relief work are first developed through a series of sketches. Each sketch is an exploration and refinement of the form, pattern, and identity of the piece. The final three-dimensional piece is engineered out of flat archival paper. Multiple pattern pieces are first mocked up to assess the shape of the sculpture. The pattern pieces are then handcarved. The carved and shaped pieces are stitched and woven with metal and waxed linen. In the sculpture's final state, it is dyed, painted, patinaed, and varnished.
The natural world is a constant. It passes through season after season and keeps on. The trilliums, mayflowers, and mayapples come up in spring, the grass grows high in summer, the leaves turn in autumn, and the snow falls in winter. But every spring, the sun comes out, the snow melts, the ice breaks away, the water laps the banks of the creek, and the cycle begins again. It is this constancy that impacts my life. The dappled light of the forest, the movement of the sun across the sky, and my young summers spent sitting on low hanging tree branches dipping my toes in the cool creek water and watching the star like reflections dance and flitter on the rolling waves. Light transforms the landscape, and landscape transforms the light."
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