MONIQUE JANSEN
Born in 1970, Jansen graduated BFA in 1992 and MFA in 1995 from Elam School of Fine Arts, University of Auckland. She also gained her Certificate in Adult Teaching from AIT in 1995.
Jansen is driven by her fascination for the divide between the handmade and the machine-generated, and her love for repetitive mark-making. Using her ‘hand as machine’ and replicating single motifs (such as a 2mm square), she will create an entire art work – often on a large scale to intensify the significance of that simple motif. Unable to disguise the inconsistencies unwittingly caused by the hand, Jansen delights in the element of chance that accompanies her mechanical process. From a distance these inconsistencies might manifest as undulations, and it is only on closer inspection that they are visible as the ‘hand of the artist’.
She uses the simplest of materials – stencils, pencils, paper and scissors. In addition to her works on paper, she creates other extraordinary works with painstaking care – such as the hanging necklace made of the ‘punch outs’ from a hole puncher, or the Maths exercise book in which she has cut out each square of the grid pattern on every page. The work is laborious, intense and exact – even monotonous – yet the rhythm of the process of making draws Jansen back again and again to her work which she recognises as being a negation of society’s contemporary inclination towards ‘fast-everything’.
GRANTS AND AWARDS
2006 Creative New Zealand and Department of Conservation’s Wild Creations Residency (Aoraki/Mt Cook)
2004 Merit, Artspace Drawing Award
2002, finalist, Waikato Contemporary Art Award
2000, AUT School of Art & Design Research Grant
1997, AUT School of Art & Design Research Grant
1993-94, University of Auckland’s Masters and Honours Degree Scholarship
1991, University of Auckland’s Rothmans Endowment Fund Gordon Harris Print Award
BIBLIOGRAPHY
2008 Contemporary New Zealand Art 5, by Elizabeth Caughey, David Bateman Ltd
2007 Fabrication, exhibition catalogue, essay Peter Shand
2007 Wild Creations, exhibition catalogue, kate Wells, Lopdell House
2004 Artists page in New New Zealand Art, ed. Ben Curnow
2002 Lush, exhibition catalogue, essay by Natasha Conland
2001 The Contingency of Vision, Peter Shand, The Suter Gallery, Nelson
2000 The Food of Art: NZ Painters and their Food, Keith Stewart, Craig Potton Publishing
2000 ‘Inheriting the Netherlands: A Century of Dutch Art in New Zealand’, exhibition catalogue, essay by Natasha Conland
1999 Labour or Love, exhibition catalogue, essay by Casper Millar
1996 Oil and Water, exhibition catalogue, essay by Peter Shand
GALLERY
Contact via this site.