Medicinal Nature

About

In the main dining room Jenny presents Medicinal Nature, a new body of work created over the last year. A series of laser engraved limited edition prints of everyday plants and shrubs, many of which are traditionally believed to have medicinal qualities. These prints have a soft, sepia, almost Victorian quality to them, despite being created with the new technology of laser engraving.

Smith draws our attention to the ordinary and everyday beauty of the natural world. These are plants that we may walk past in parks, woodlands or even here in the grounds of House of an Art Lover, and barely notice. By picking them out individually and isolating them on off-white Somerset paper, Smith provides us with the opportunity to pause, and look at the individual character and personality of each plant or shrub she has selected.

The main gallery also contains five prints from a new Edible Garden series. Food freshly picked from the garden or allotment, with it’s roots and leaves still visible remind us of the joy of connecting with the earth and growing your own vegetables instead of buying it over-packaged from the supermarket.

The rear dining room contains a selection of earlier work, including What is Drawing? and What is Love? These are limited edition cut-out prints that contain handwritten answers to the title question. The Circle Series prints are an abstract investigation into the interconnectedness of all things and Imprint lines are a series of embossed etchings originally commissioned for the Mandarin Oriental Hotel in London that explore the way that memory imprints onto our consciousness.

Jenny Smith is an artist living and working in Edinburgh. She was awarded the exhibition here at House for an Art Lover on the strength of her work presented in the SSA’s Annual Exhibition earlier this year. She studied Drawing & Painting at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art, Dundee and Multi-Disciplinary Print at UWE Bristol. Jenny has won numerous Awards for her work, including the Royal Scottish Academy Award for Painting and the Friends of The Royal Scottish Academy Bursary, with which she undertook a research visit to Japan. Jenny is a Professional member of the Society of Scottish Artists.

Jenny is concurrently presenting work in the Studio Pavilion gallery in the group show Part Seen, Part Imagined running 05 October – 01 December 2019.