Bio
Jillian (she/her) is a photographer, printmaker, and illustrator, currently living, and finding home, in Nogojiwanong (Peterborough). Jillian is a settler with German, Irish, and Scottish ancestors, though many stories of from where and how are few, or yet to be learned. With an ever evolving, fluid, and tender relationship to queerness and disability, bisexual and mad are also identities that she holds.
While Jillian often utilizes digital photography in her business and art practice, her home and heart lay with film photography. Self-taught, Jillian has been honing her skills in film photography for close to a decade. Beginning as a portrait photographer, Jillian fell in love with film early on in her learning for the intimacy and softness that it brings to her photographs, and its profound or perhaps magical ability to capture what people are feeling in their hearts at that moment in time.
Jillian’s printmaking practice grew from her love of pen and ink drawing, and now includes linocut along with playful explorations in risograph, textile printing, and monoprint.
Artist Statement
Primarily working as a printmaker, photographer, and illustrator, my work is firmly and delightfully grounded in place. The water bodies close by, along with the plants, birds, fish, and other beings who call the same land home, are often the subjects of my prints and photographs. Moreover, my art is deeply inspired by my evolving relationships with and connection to these beings and bodies, as I continue to explore my identity and responsibilities as a queer, mad, settler, and treaty person.
In the past 2 years, I’ve noticed a shift in my focus, towards documenting, extending, and lingering in the process of art making. This comes from a desire to mirror the “what” in the “how”, bringing the same anti-capitalist themes of rest, slowness, and connection that appear in my work, to my art practice itself.
For now, this means exploring projects that take place over a long period of time such as large scale printmaking, drawing, and hand stitching; it means valuing that which exists in unfinished or partial states; and it means coming back to creating in community, over cups of tea, by the water, among the trees, and at community art drop ins.
