"I don't think, I feel."
As Subject Matter curators we are constantly on the lookout for new artists - and as you can imagine, we get lots of submissions! But it is extremely rare for an artist to email us out of nowhere, for us to click that link in the email, and then to fall in love. That has happened only once, and it happened with Jenny Woods.
Jenny is a self-taught artist. This means she never attended art school, never had a critique, never even learnt the basics of lighting and camera techniques. All the beautiful work on this page she has created herself, through her own artistic inspiration and many hours of hard work; trying, over and over again, to get the perfect shot. Her artistic practice has been born out of her own creative spirit, her need to create art and to push her own boundaries as an artist. It's hard to describe how difficult and rare that is, and how it takes a special sort of character to achieve and to make work this way.
Throughout her childhood in rural America, her camera was her best friend.
"Year after year, no matter how much everything changes, I keep coming back to photography. I've never felt anything as amazing as I do when my eyes are wide and my finger is lingering over the shutter. I see the world as my playground. I see light in the shadows. I see untold stories bursting out of places and people. I see so much beauty in the world, which is funny coming from someone who also feels so much sadness.
I'm here to observe. To document. To try to better understand the world around me."
Jenny is also a poet and a painter. She is an incredible creative life-force and we were so proud to celebrate her in our 2018 London exhibition "We See You, We Hear You" which showcased 15 exceptional female artists, rising stars. We are also proud to stand beside her not just as an artist, but as a woman. Her openness about her own life, her struggles with depression and anxiety, her weight, being a woman in the city - she shares all this with her 20,000+ followers on Instagram. And in turn, they feel less alone with their own struggles. But it's not always easy for her.
I could write about Jenny for hours but I will leave you with one small, but illustrative, story. We exhibited her work in a show in 2017, and on the last day, two teenage girls walked in and asked to see her photography. We started talking about her and it turned out that both girls had travelled over two hours, from a regional English town, just to see her work. When I asked them why, one of them told me that Jenny's Instagram had helped them so much through their own difficult times and they wanted to come and see her work in real life, to feel closer to her.
Both Liezel and I have Jenny's work in our homes and we can both say, this is an artist, and a woman, you want in your life.