Fideles Oculi

About

Jennie Jewitt-Harris is an artist working with the concepts of time and mortality in relation to the physicality of the contemporary world and those within it. Jewitt-Harris compassionately utilises her experience in medicine in addition to her role in the support of organ transplantation to investigate the relationship of attachment to a person’s own organs after death, specifically the eyes, the ‘windows of the soul’. Jennie Jewitt-Harris tells stories of experience across time and from person to person, memories of relationships had and those to come, snapshots of where life and death meet at the juncture of the passing of an organ from one human being to another.

Her intricate drawings, assemblages and collages express what influences us over life-times, using metaphors such as driftwood drawn with pencil and charcoal to echo the time-based disintegration of physical matter, woven with the more permanent media of contemporary collage. Her works embody personal histories somehow frozen in time and depicted as new ‘living’ entities of their own. We are left questioning where life ends or begins, what makes a life alive or a death an end. How time can move or stop and how we exist outside of time when passing through to the other side of the twilight veil.

Jennie Jewitt-Harris studied Fine Art at UCA Farnham, and shortly after was Artist in Residence at Watts Gallery/Artists Village. Jennie is currently researching for a PhD in Fine Art Practice having received the Watts/UCA Scholarship. She is investigating the relationship we have with our eyes that results in many people refusing to donate their corneas after death. Jennie combines her art practice with her role as a doctor, as CEO of international charity Transplant Links. She had two artworks exhibited in the 2018 Royal Academy Summer Exhibition.

David Mach RA, on the selection committee for this year’s Summer Exhibition spoke about her exhibition at C&C Gallery

“This is a clever artist... There’s a degree of control, a mastery of handling to the point of delicacy that holds her work together along with your attention.

It’s no mistake her collages are not square or rectangular edged. They make their own sinewy forms, hanging as they grow it would appear but surely manipulated by her into shapes like organs, pieces that might all fit together and work as one. 

Is there a Frankenstein’s monster thing going on there? That’s perhaps too dark a description and doesn’t necessarily fit with the lightness and humour I also see in her work. It will be again be her own history in medicine coming forward and if that’s the case, Good! She’s using it well.

She’s giving us art and she’s giving us an instruction manual in this show. 

I like the work a lot. Easy for me to admire how her pieces go together and easy for me to get excited about the next stages they’ll go through. 

I’m already looking forward to their next episode.”