Art: Jennifer Yorke's collages are beautiful and strange in equal measure

Date
1 July 2013

Beautiful and slightly strange, Jennifer Yorke’s intricate collages explore contrasting ideas about the way things should look. By taking fragments of different objects and juxtaposing them against one another, Jennifer separates images from their usual meanings and creates new, lovely and often unsettling combinations.

Raw meat and elaborately coiffed wigs feature heavily and flowerlike petals are conjured by billowing smoke in an almost magical approximation of human physiology, which tends to be her principal subject. It is precisely this – the human body, and how we attempt to contain it – that interests her the most. By exploiting the fragmentary nature of collage, Jennifer forces her viewer to question our inherently human desire to view objects as wholes, instead insisting that the thing and its image are two very different ideas. As a result, the artist provides the attractive and the absurd in almost equal measure, captivating us just long enough to draw us in, only for us to withdraw with a gasp and a hushed giggle.

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Jennifer Yorke: Venus

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Jennifer Yorke: Daisy Does It

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Jennifer Yorke: Hope is the Thing

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Jennifer Yorke: Heart You

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Jennifer Yorke: The Big, Ugly Truth

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About the Author

Maisie Skidmore

Maisie joined It’s Nice That fresh out of university in the summer of 2013 as an intern before joining full time as an Assistant Editor. Maisie left It’s Nice That in July 2015.

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