42. Jessica Lin - "Glimpse Of Paradise #4" - 12x12"

My current body of work is abstract landscape photography. I extract elements from photographs that I’ve taken while travelling, camping, or in the garden, and recompose them to result in a finished image that is recognizably a landscape, but also includes layers of texture and colour in ways not found in reality.

I developed this process because I was unsatisfied with the record of events and places that photography traditionally provides. Having been a professional commercial and portrait photographer since 2000, I took a trip to France in 2008 to reconnect with what it was that I loved about photography in the first place. This 3-week trip blew my mind and completely changed my life, but the photographs I took while there didn’t come close to expressing that. After a few years of considering how to solve this problem, I began to use parts of different images to embellish each other and heighten the sense of wonder in the resulting piece. 

While travelling and photographing continued to be essential parts of my process for almost a decade, equally important to me was how I used elements from those images to create artwork that more fully express my personal experience of that time and place, or of my life in general. In 2021, my husband and I moved to a forested rural property, where I focused on building, planting, and photographing the gardens.

Because these are all photographs from my own life experiences, the artwork is very biographical and even a self-portrait in some cases, in spite of being a landscape image. Most pieces contain parts from 3-7 different photographs, often varying widely in terms of when and where these images were taken. The layering technique creates a visual puzzle – viewers often comment on the meditative or hypnotic experience of losing themselves in one of my pieces – both engaging the mind and freeing the imagination.

Throughout these pieces, the cycles of nature and the interconnectedness of everything (and everyone) are strong themes. I aim to create images that look like memories of how it feels to be in a certain place or time of your life, rather than how it looks to be in a specific place. By bringing out the magical in everyday objects and surroundings, I hope to enhance the viewer’s appreciation of the world around them.