We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Jessica Lin a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Jessica, thanks for joining us today. What’s been the most meaningful project you’ve worked on?

In 2018, I created an multi-sensory immersive installation entitled “The Serenity Experience”. It was inspired by one of my 2D artworks (“Serenity”), which seemed to radiate calm, and which was the first piece I created after starting a daily meditation practice.. the more time I spent with the piece, the more I wondered what it would feel like to be inside a bubble of this feeling. I did a lot of research about what triggers the brain to feel happy and calm, and included as many of these elements as possible in the installation. The first version of “The Serenity Experience” was a 5×10′ hut, where people entered and experienced a video projection, along with audio, scent, and tactile elements. Some people stayed for 30 seconds, a few people stayed for the full 25 minutes of the video. Anyone who stayed more than 5 minutes left noticeably calmer, and I could also feel the effects myself.

Since then, I’ve had the opportunity to adapt the installation to a handful of different spaces and circumstances – everywhere from an open studio event in Paris, France, to the space under my young nephew’s loft bed. During the Covid-19 pandemic, I was contacted by a local BIA and asked to create a version of the piece on the scale of the neighborhood. After many months of collaborating with Jennifer Lay at the Riverside BIA and local businesses to to figure out the logistics and working hard to upscale all of the elements, “The Serenity Experience in Riverside” launched in the winter of 2021. It occupied 10 storefronts of local small businesses, and had many interactive online components as well. Creating it was the biggest challenge of my art career so far, and also the most rewarding project I’ve been a part of. The pandemic lock-downs were obviously very hard on small businesses, and I’m sure anxiety was higher in the general population as well. I received a lot of heart-warming feedback about the positive effects of the project, which made the experience even richer for me. It also encouraged me to think in terms of a dramatically larger scale, which has led to my current work-in-progress (more on that to come!).

You can view the online version of “The Serenity Experience” here: https://www.jessicalin.ca/theserenityexperience

Jessica, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

My training and background is in photography, and for the first decade or so I worked in commercial photography, as well as wedding and portrait photography. In 2008, someone asked me what I loved to photograph, and I realized that I’d lost touch with my love of photography and being creative. So I did what any sensible creative person would do: cashed out my savings, and booked a trip to the south of France. I’d never been to France, and figured there had to be a reason that artists have gravitated there for centuries.

I travelled around alone for a few weeks, and took hundreds of photographs. I fell in love with the adventure of being somewhere new and unknown. I re-found my love of photography. And as fate would have it, I also met an Irishman and fell in love with him (his name is Norman, we’ve been married for 12 years now). After that, I started travelling more often, and taking photographs wherever we went. The problem was that when I got home and looked at these images, even the great ones never really conveyed how beautiful and amazing it felt to be wherever it was. I wanted to create art from our travel experiences, but also wanted the images to be unique, and to incorporate many different parts of the adventure.

Over time, I’d had to learn a lot about using photo-editing software in order to solve problems for my clients, now I put this experience to work in creating art pieces. I extracted elements from different photographs that I’d taken, and recomposed them to create reality-based fantasies. The first few years, I created images that were very travel-based, using photographs from that first trip to France, and a trip to Northern Ireland shortly thereafter. This evolved into my next phase, which was entirely landscape-based images, with abstract backgrounds and silhouetted tree lines in the foreground. Because of the semi-abstract nature of these pieces, viewers saw and felt all sorts of different things, and I really enjoyed talking to people at the many art fairs I participated in during these years.

And then the pandemic happened. No travel. No art fairs. Instead, anxiety and uncertainty.

We started going for walks in nearby ravines. And as we walked and talked, I photographed. I wanted to capture the feeling of being surrounded by these spaces, with trees arching overhead like a protective architecture. And as I began to create the artwork from these scenes, I envisioned these pieces on my own living room walls, taking up so much space that they would seem like the setting itself, rather than an object on the wall. I layered in underwater bubbles, and fireflies (or fairies), lily pads, flowers, crystals, and magic. In total, 6 large-scale pieces were created from these walks and talks, the largest two being 4×6′ – much bigger than I’d ever made my 2D artwork before.

The more I pictured the finished versions of these pieces, the more I wanted to create a space where reality was blurred between the artwork on the walls and the 3-dimentional space of the room those walls contained. A place full of living plants and blossoms, with branches overhead. And with my chairs, and the rug from our living room. Tea cups and trays, unused in a year of not having any company over to visit. So I created this installation in the Studio 102 Gallery in Toronto (which also just happened to be the exact size of our living room!), and had it open to viewers one at a time by appointment. To spend time in that space felt enchanting, and I started thinking of how to expand this sort of experience even more.

In the process of envisioning and creating this work and installation, we also decided it was time to leave the city, and head for new adventures. We put our house up for sale, and bought a place about 4 ½ hours northeast of Toronto. A place on 42 acres of land. Our new project, where we are currently creating a sleep-over immersive art installation in a tiny vintage camper at the edge of the woods. The overall plan is a collaborative, multi-year, multi-media, multi-acre art installation where we can host Airbnb guests wanting to immerse themselves in the magic of the place, as well as small artist residencies and retreats. The property is teaching me to think not only much bigger in scale, but of creating art that exists not only in 2 or even 3 dimensions, but in 4 dimensions.. we’re planting things this spring, while trying to envision the space they’ll occupy 5 or 10 years down the road. It’s a huge challenge, and a great adventure.

I’ve also been incredibly lucky in that the local arts community is fabulous. There’s a studio tour that’s been running for nearly 30 years, with many talented artists and craftspeople; I’m excited to be participating in that studio tour this summer and fall! I’m really looking forward to talking to people about art in person again, and it’s great that I’ll be able to do so right in the setting that is inspiring the work – our garden. I’ve already made one piece – “When We Dreamt of Paradise” – that combines imagery from our forest and Monet’s garden at Giverny. The current long-term plan includes planting the garden now that I’d like to be photographing over the next decade. My hope is that when people visit the property, the lines between artwork and reality will barely exist.

For you, what’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative?

At some point I realized that “creating” doesn’t need to end on the page (canvas, monitor, etc.) – that with intent and patience, we can also create the reality we are living in to a certain extent. Mindfulness and meditation have been part of my art practice for the past 6 years or so, and that, combined with my art practice, helped me take a leap of faith to make dramatic changes in my life. The most obvious big change is our recent move from big city life to a forest and garden rural property.. I used to have a forest cabin “happy place” that I would envision while meditating, and now I feel like that vision has leaked out into reality. In a really good way.

Have any books or other resources had a big impact on you?

There are three books about the creative process that I’ve read repeatedly, and which I’ve found incredibly helpful and inspirational: “Big Magic” by Elizabeth Gilbert, “The War of Art” by Steven Pressfield, and “The Artist’s Way” by Julia Cameron. Also, “Worth Every Penny” by Erin Verbeck and Sarah Petty – this last one was one I read when a large part of my business was portrait and wedding photography, and it taught me to have the confidence to compete based on quality rather than price. If you don’t charge enough, you won’t be in business for long!    

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.jessicalin.ca
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jessicalinphoto/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/JessicaLinPhoto/
• Vimeo: https://vimeo.com/jessicalinphoto
• blog: https://www.jessicalin.ca/artblog
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