Jacquelyn Stephens
Aqueous Blooms

18 May - 8 June 2024
Opening Reception: Thursday 23rd May, 6 - 8 pm
West End Art Space

Artist Biography

Jacquelyn Stephens is based in Melbourne and has been painting for over 25 years since being awarded a Bachelor of Fine Art Majoring in Painting from the Victorian College of the Arts, Melbourne. Over the years she has had several successful solo and group exhibitions in commercial galleries and artists run spaces. Her paintings can be seen in many media publications and are held in private collections worldwide and recently appeared on the popular TV renovation shows 'The Block', ‘Healthy Homes Australia’ and ‘Love it Or List It’. Many of the key themes in her work have been informed by her interest in water, science, nature, the environment and the world of medicine (especially following a brush with death from a mysterious brain tumour in 1997, the cellular origin of which was never discovered).

Artist Statement

Jacquelyn’s paintings explore a sublime of the small and celebrate the life forces and light energies inherent in all things microscopic, sub-atomic and, especially, aquatic. Having grown up on the coast at Flinders and spending endless summers snorkelling around the local beaches, she is also deeply inspired by the life-giving waters of the sea and what inhabits them. What is happening beneath the surface of a crashing wave or in a rock-pool on a micro and macro level? She creates underwater fields of mysterious miniscule glowing forms occupying ambiguously lit spaces. Jacquelyn also references the blurred light or ‘bokeh’ of photography, dark-light of microscopic imagery, and all the image making documentary world of seeing life’s glow. She alludes to sea creatures, nudibranchs, anemones, seaweeds, bioluminescent organisms and minuscule cell life as all these universes inspire and inform the content and pictorial spaces in her paintings.

More recently it has become important to make paintings that talk about the current wellness of our oceans and waterways. She adds fragments of tiny plastic, sourced from years of beach combing, to her paintings. Sometimes using the plastic, moulded and faded by the sea, as a formal colour device and sometimes as an invisible trace. Either way it is the notion of the plastic being there (visible or not) that is important.

Ultimately the paintings are about a sense of awe and wonder at miraculous microscopic life and water. The hope is that the paintings trigger an uplifting and contemplative experience for the viewer as well as reminding us of the beauty in, and of our important relationship to, the fragile natural world.