Today is
Drawing is a great creative and intellectual pleasure of mine. I started studying academically on my own and with private teachers at the end of 2023.
I designed this site to share my incremental growth as a self-taught artist, away from the harassment of social media. It is a chronological timeline of regularly updated work-in-progress.
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Artist statement
I'm Jen Boyd and I like to draw. I moved from New York to Paris six years ago and have been working as an art director and graphic design lead in French tech since my arrival. My expertise in data-driven brand maketing has made me particularly uncomfortable with being blown around in the unchecked, electric green super tornado of the digital revolution. My response to the overwhelm is to do my best to create images that reflect my own contemplation upon this globally shared experience. My approach has two facets: present and past.
1. Present: the electric green super tornado, as I understand it—
We know the tech giants are dangerously and knowingly exaggerating biases and eroding critical thinking. Their algorithms exploit manipulative engagement tactics to push products and deceptions, targeting us in ways we can't ourselves see or even understand. We know breathtaking quantities of personal data are being collected and tracked every moment we are online, including biometric data, which helps these platforms know what we are feeling—when, where and why. We know and can feel how this unprecedented level of intimate surveillance is creating a culture of self-moderation that is quietly suppressing our power to think and behave freely. As a result, these platforms threaten to unravel the fundamental systems needed to maintain democracies by dismantling our ability to talk to each other, trust each other and our institutions, and solve mutually shared problems—like climate collapse, for example.
2. Past: personal interests—
My academic study of drawing started a little over a year ago. There's a lot to learn and understanding the kinds of images I want to create is part of the process I'm currently moving through.
My drawings are generally informed by an enthusiasm for history and philosophy and sometimes from a personal awaking to the spectacular global transformation that happened during the age of enlightenment and the industrial revolution. In 2024, one of my favorite drawings came from stumbling onto the history of faux pearls, a seemingly neutral topic that revealed a remarkable story of how humans can share intrinsic aesthetics, values and motivations across the globe—over millennia. Faux pearls lead me to early 20th century costume jewellery, one of the many industries that emerged after WWI and II, turning the immense cache of scrapped war materials into new cultural expressions. Other topics followed suit and I find myself this year interested in exploring the long history of mannequins.
1 + 2 = my direction for 2025—
Like the seeming neutrality of faux pearls, I’m interested in how mannequins might embody centuries of human perceptions and innovations. Their forms, functions, the materials they are made from, and their physical and cultural processes of decay, seem to me to have a relevant through-line to AI, robotics and climate collapse.
Let's see how this idea plays out.
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