I've been mooning over the work of mixed-media collage artist Jennifer Gordon for ages. Every image she creates makes me flutter with delight. And today, I fell hard for this piece on her blog, and couldn't help but purchase the diminutive original from her shop, Stiletto Heights.
In Jennifer's own words, she is "very inspired by Neo~Victorian and Edwardian themes. Steampunk, vintage belly dance images, Ziegfeld Follies, Ophelia, flappers, and circus girls, to name just a few." Why, those are all the very things that I love, fancy that!
Like dusty pressed flower petals unearthed from a long-forgotten trunk in the attic, Jennifer's collages ache with hidden stories and desires half-met. Her characters are doe-eyed silent era theater beauties, pale gilded fashion icons, and folkloric dreamers, all frozen in time.
Jennifer assembles her pieces from antique letters and old ledgers, found images and ephemera, layering decorative papers with paints and pigments and watercolor crayons. In the end, a window into a secret history is made, and we lucky voyeurs catch a glimpse of the the color-saturated dream-world these wayward men and tender heroines inhabit.
A quick interwebs search will turn up a number of lovely interviews with Jennifer ~ I especially enjoyed this in-depth one on Stainless Steel Droppings, which reveals that she has been a magician's assistant and a scenic artist, a comic book writer and a stage actress... her own secret histories, as if she, too, is one of her own characters. As she says in the interview, "Each piece is a self portrait, only the pictures are not me."
It comes as no surprise that Post Secret tops her list of favorite links, as each of her images, with their titles like shreds of poetry, are ripe with the whispery secrets of ghosts.
You may find art books, prints, stickers, bookmarks, and so many more intriguing art works at Stiletto Heights, Jennifer's Etsy shop.... where All Women Have Secrets.
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5 comments:
She was one of my very first etsy friends and I have a small collection of her work & comics as well...so yeah, love her!
thank you so much for such a lovely feature....some of the things you wrote gave me goose bumps.
xoxoxoxo
ohh..I almost started weeping....Thank you for sharing her for those of us not yet familiar with her work.
gorgeous work & great feature! thanks for sharing with us
Wonderful feature. Her work really is worth mooning over. Every time I turn around I am wanting something new from her site. I could decorate my whole house with stuff from her site and still have images left over that I want and wouldn't have wall space to put them on.
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