Using paint, inkjet, neural networks, her garden and her phone, Jennifer Mehigan’s prints and paintings blend new and old methods of making and processing the world – a relationship the artist views as a ‘strained mother-daughter’ dynamic. Mehigan’s wider practice also incorporates sculpture, filmmaking, perfumery, writing, parties, workshops, and flower farming, deploying sensory experience to explore the awkwardness of making images as they are overproduced and harvested. Her work occupies a space where pop culture, painterly gestures, digital materiality, autobiography, “public feelings” (after Ann Cvetkovich) and self-help literature can interact, allowing her to investigate, often through a non-human lens, how power manifests in the world.
Mehigan’s research focuses largely on closed systems and "defaults," beginning with the computer and extending through domestic and public environments. Through this framework, she investigates themes of submission, withholding, oversharing, and the right to remain illegible—borrowing from GDPR legislation. Her work is particularly informed by omissions and misunderstandings of women’s contributions to horticulture and agriculture, examining the tension between excess and absence as it manifests within various enclosures, namely the field, the map, the screen and the picture frame.
Previously based in Singapore and Belfast, she now lives and works in the Slieve Felim mountains in Co. Limerick.
Cowardess.online still exists (for now!) as a semi-organised website of previous work.
This website is used as more of a dumping ground.
Contact me.