Jessie Van der Laan

Jessie Van der Laan

Knoxville

Tennessee

My current work views the world through the lens of a parent, simultaneously embracing joy, frustration, hope and fear. My work has always engaged in the liminal states of consciousness, through examinations of precipices, seams, folds, and crevices. In this new work, figurative elements of hands: my own and my children’s, become further lenses for exhuberence or despair. In some cases the hands obscure, and in others highlight. Both experiences are true, useful, and not mutually exclusive. I often feel that my arms are my most precious resource. They allow me to hold hands across parking lots, to carry bags, to prepare meals, to wash dishes, to gesture when I am intensely speaking, to draw, to write, and they are often full.