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Katja Jacobs Artist Statement In the studio the painting is an ambiguous poetic terrain – a field of endless possibilities. During painting earlier passions and preoccupations surface and recede, leading to new insights into the language of painting. Painting is an act of contemplation or meditation; images, like words, invite us to think silently. Slowly beyond the interaction of materials, inner patterns of meaning are revealed. More questions, more possibilities arise. On a good day you discover a new continent. Katja Jacobs December 2004 The evolution of memory into the imaginary and the re-invented is at the center of the paintings and installations of recent years. Complex surfaces hold images and texts, changed as if seen through layers of time. Perforated, fragmented, stitched papers and fabric, beeswax, oil and pigments are transformed into visual terrains of remembrance. Katja Jacobs October 1999 For the past three years, Katja Jacobs has been exploring images and memories from her past, using them as a point of departure for what I regard as some of her most provocative and engaging work to date. The project began as a series works on paper, but now includes a number canvases. Jacobs incorporates specific images of places and people crucial to her history, transforming them and often concealing them with layers of "text" that blur the distinction between drawing and writing. At times, we can read phrases, words, fragments of sentences, while at others, known alphabets and language dissolve into graphic abstraction. The series employs literal collage, as well as visual palimpsest, with layers often stitched together to create yet another kind of intensely physical "drawing." This powerful physically is further expressed by the rich variety of materials, from graphite and paper to cloth and wax, used to suggest surfaces transformed by the passage of time. In these works, Jacobs explores themes of memory, loss, distance, and displacement; she probes notions of language, dislocation, and retrieval. These are issues relevant to anyone aware of the passage of time and to anyone concerned with the particulars of personal identity, but they have special resonance for anyone whose life has been disrupted by change and relocation – experiences common to many Canadians, these days. That these themes are filtered through a female consciousness makes them, in my view, all the more arresting. 1992
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