Jen Stark

Jen Stark harnesses the power of line and repetition to create technicolour works that vibrate with kinetic energy. Her iterative patterns appear across multiple mediums including painting, installation, sculpture and animation. Op Artists like Bridget Riley and Marina Apollonio are key inspirations, as well as the Finish Fetish artists of 1960s Los Angeles. Consciousness and spirituality are central themes in Stark’s practice. Mono Chrome (2017), for instance, is a large wooden relief made of swirling rings of white, grey and black. While each individual tone is flat, together they shift, flow and merge, encouraging viewers to lose themself in an altered state of perception - much like meditation, or an acid trip.

Stark bases her work on the mathematical precision of nature. To create her works, she often looks at images of structures found in nature like fractals, mimetic topographies and sacred geometries are mimicked. In addition, The Golden Ratio and the Fibonacci Sequence appear throughout her practice, in the shell-like forms of works such as Centrifugal (2010), or in recurring motifs of sinking, flower-like black holes in works like Abyss (2011). Through these parallels, Stark elucidates how the big and the small often echo one another - toying with perception and bending senses to dizzying effect.