I Like Your Work: Conversations with Artists, Curators & Collectors

Jennifer Combe is a mother, artist, and associate professor of art at The University of Montana. Before shifting to higher education, she taught K12 in Washington State public schools for fifteen years. Her artwork investigates gender, contemporary mothering, and children’s development. Her visual work has been exhibited at The Missoula Art Museum, Holter Museum of Art, Paris Gibson Square Museum of Art, The Gift Shop exhibition space at The Henry Art Gallery in Seattle, the NAEA gallery in Virginia, and The Washington State Center for Performing Arts. Her work is featured in the book An Artist and a Mother, published by Demeter Press. Her work in art education spans early childhood education, community arts, and social theory.

Her educational work has been featured in The Journal of Social Theory in Art Education, The Journal of the Motherhood Initiative for Research and Community Involvement, The Journal of Cultural Research in Art Education, and Visual Arts Research. She has lectured for The National Art Education Association in New York, Chicago, San Diego, Dallas/Fort Worth and New Orleans. She lectured on mothering and art education in Florence, Italy for The Motherhood Initiative on Research and Community Involvement.

She lives outside of Missoula, MT with her family.

"My research and artistic work explore cultural constructs around gender and mothering, ability, and schooling. Drawing from autobiography, I locate the essence of an experience and then distill my understanding of that experience into simplified, often geometric, forms. This process helps deconstruct cultural paradigms that complicate interpretation and meaning—ultimately how we perceive ourselves. Working in the studio involves a form of meditation and contemplative translation of experiences and anxieties through the direct process of applying paint or fabric to various surfaces such as glass, panel, linen, or paper. Non-objective abstraction allows an ambient space for the ambiguities of memory and the tumult of emotion to be freely realized. Often working in multiples, I process experiences in singular works and then rejoin the simplified forms to make a complex, yet fleeting whole. My hope is to claim control over the ambiguities of experience and emotion, if even for a moment."

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