Photographs - each 20 x 90cm

Dancers: Jenny De Leon; Sjouke van Houten.
Photographer: Eva Karlsson

Slideshow version

Photo of the displayed work

Jenny's talk from the Opening Night. Artists Talk About Their Work.
Wednesday 19 March 2008, 7:00-8:30pm, in the Gallery Space.

Facilitated by Sandra Atkins.

Sandra: Jenny I might just invite you to speak yourself about your expression, and the process that you’ve taken.

Jenny De Leon: Thank you very much for coming. It’s nice to have a moment to share my work.  I don’t have too much to say about my . . . It’s a personal response, my personal response because my prayer very often is “Father forgive me, I don’t know what I’m doing.” And I think I know what I’m doing ‘cause I’m an intelligent sort of person and I’ve been to university and I can write and I think I know what I’m hearing, but then I’m out on the ocean and the waves are throwing me around. I guess the sequence that I had in my mind, I first of all had these sort of strips, they made a sequence, so I guess my sequence was new born, woman, sheltered, broken, worshipping, naked, and forgiven.  Just kind of the way you can read it.  The “save me” was the first part, “Father forgive them” . . . Or, as I said “Father forgive me.” Then the photographs. I would also like to thank Mike who helped me also but he chose not to put his name up there, and then I ended up with about a hundred and sixty photographs, and I needed to choose fifteen.  That was kind of hard, choosing . . . and then the saying came, the bit, the “but not innocent” came. 

Sandra: We spoke in the artists’ workshops about the way the various ways our artists work, working with the concept from the beginning or kind of working at the end, and I know this is something that’s been in you for a while, can you tell us if…do you have a spiritual discipline that you have practiced alongside it that feeds it through the process of your creating?

Jenny: This work or my life?

Sandra: You can answer in either or both.

Jenny: My spiritual discipline is dance . . . I dance, and dancing’s about commitment and perseverance, and practice. Every now and then you hit the moment and it all comes together and it’s satori and its effortless and it doesn’t hurt an its all . . . Those are the high moments. And then it’s all about commitment and perseverance, and for me, dancing is also my prayer, so my personal pilgrimage with . . . I knew that in an exhibition which, its not twenty four seven, but its up for a quite a few hours, I knew I couldn’t just sleep here and dance, all night and all day and all night, it would get boring and too tiring, but this was the next best way to express my personal discipline or my personal prayer.