We were lucky to catch up with Jenny Day recently and have shared our conversation below.

Jenny, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. It’s always helpful to hear about times when someone’s had to take a risk – how did they think through the decision, why did they take the risk, and what ended up happening. We’d love to hear about a risk you’ve taken.

Over the last few years as an artist I have primarily made paintings and sculptures. Recently I have expanded my artistic practice to include a massive installation, A Feast To Remember, to be exhibited in December 2023 at Alabama Contemporary. It has been a long term project that has required learning new skills, getting help from other artists, and being open about the finished product. It has been uncomfortable and there have been many failures. It has felt like a huge risk to not think of myself as a painter or sculptor but as an artist. To be open to any material that needs to be used to express an idea.

The exhibition A Feast To Remember will investigate climate change with humor and caution. A site-specific installation depicting natural and personal disaster, new work will include acrylic on canvas paintings and various ceramic and mixed media light-emitting sculptures.

Central to A Feast to Remember is a ruined dinner party on a dining table and several large paintings. Acrylic on canvas paintings will act as windows into a ravaged landscape, hot pink algae blooms and the aftermath of hurricanes. Visitors will explore a chaotic version of the Last Supper, all ceramic and mixed media sculpture, whimsical and raucous. A hand tufted rug, crocheted plants, embroidered napkins, chairs tipped over. A chandelier and acrylic chains suspended from the ceiling. The lights adorned with swans and snakes, dripping with flowers, loops of chain, and rhinestones. On the table a feast; plates mounded with food, cakes smashed, a beaded bear tearing into ripe pomegranates, a ceramic alligator sauntering across the chaos. A shimmering coyote caught in the act of ripping a chair apart.

The exhibition celebratory in its joyful chaos, a final party abandoned, subsumed by biophilia, a cautionary disaster in the making. The installation will examine our need for myth while incapsulating our relationship to land and the exploitation of the environment. The work is not just coping with the world but refashioning it. Toxic hues, broken objects and the remnants of a diner party disturbed by chaos will be a reflection of an external world gone awry. Anarchy amidst a kingdom in peril.

Jenny, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

I have always made things. I did not take making objects or my way of seeing very seriously until 2005 when I went to school at the University of Alaska Fairbanks to pursue a BFA. I went to school at night after working my full time job as a horticulturist. I quickly realized my priority was to have the time and space to continue making art. From there I went to graduate school at the University of Arizona and studied painting. Since 2014 I have been working out of my studio, making paintings and sculptures, and exhibiting my work.

I am most proud of my work ethic and determination to work through an idea. I see failure as a good thing. The sooner it happens with an idea the better. Rejection and risk feel crucial to moving forward. They point out what is important about a vision and help to strip away the parts that are boring, mundane, or redundant.

About my work

The figure has always been a ghost in my work, an ever present shadow. I thought I had tamped it down, repressed it in graduate school, only to paint work with monolithic objects and decomposing architecture. I created expansive landscapes bursting with remnants of the built environment. Intent on chasing down human impact while doing my best to ignore any thread of narrative. Over time this specter loomed large, filled the lungs of animal witnesses to chaos . Now nothing is repressed. The work shifted to include adaptive celebratory creatures, fanciful sculptures. Human presence, hinted at, long prominent in its absence, is now explicit, the human form welcomed back into the raucous bestiary of my imagined worlds.

We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.

Continuing to make art and allow myself to have the freedom to dream up wild ideas feels like an act of resilience. I often find myself questioning why I have chosen a career that does not go in a straight line, has big ups and downs, does not have a clear measurement for improvement or success, and that is not often valued by society. At this point I feel like I am bursting with ideas and I need to get them out. I would make the objects anyway, wether or not people saw them, appreciated them, bought them. Part of what makes me feel like I can be resilient is the support I do have in my life, from my partner, my family, art collectors, curators, gallerists. They remind me that my way of seeing the world is worth expressing.

What do you find most rewarding about being a creative?

I think when an idea works and other people can relate to it. I spend so much time alone in my studio with my ideas. When the final work is shown and viewers connect to it, ask questions, and want to spend time with it, seeing that it resonates with others in ways I wouldn’t have imagined.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.jennyday.com
• Instagram: @jenny.marie.day
• Facebook: @jennydayart