My work deals with themes of personal agency, gender, feminism and the relationship of womyn to technology. Histories of storytelling and the oral tradition through myth and allegory are important to me as a way to reflect on the lessons of the past while responding to the current climate of political unrest and polarised communities. I'm worried in particular about the learning lost through the perpetuation of revisionist historical narratives and the use of technological platforms to consolidate extreme positions and perpetuate fake news. 

Like a comparative anthropologist I seek common ground and similarities between stories and cultures as a way of parsing some version of the truth, which is itself a contentious aim. This could be encapsulated by the adage that there is nothing new under the sun. In particular, I’m driven to connect the ancient past to postulative, and science fiction-based futures and forms of storytelling that allow artistic licence to express topics that may be otherwise repressed as controversial or subversive. I’m also focused on the role of women in this kind of storytelling which has resulted in this new body of work that owes a debt to the original and more violent versions of European fairy tales and folklore. 

I’m undertaking the generation of the source material for these artworks through an ongoing collaboration with an AI platform. I enter language prompts into the algorithm and in return the platform generates an image for me. This process allows me to articulate my top-of-mind themes through text and discover in return the repeating patterns and motifs of my most prevalent thoughts in visual form. The AI, an alien and non-human entity, serves as a mirror to my intentions and reflects back to me the patterns of my humanness and my attempts to connect to the legacy of my human forebears. In some manner, I am also attempting to reconcile the disruption that technology is inflicting on contemporary life at this particular point in history. I am further attempting to find a way forward to engage fruitfully with this foreboding, avant garde technology which threatens to replace the necessity of human involvement in creative production.

#disneynightmare is a repeating prompt used to generate these images.

Jennifer Tazewell Mawby (she/her) is a Canadian/British artist working in Vancouver BC, Canada.Working across drawing, painting, and sculptural installation, her predominately figurative works are idiosyncratic and at times with pictorial worlds and narratives gleaned from ancient history, myth, and science fiction. After studying at Emily Carr University of Art and Design, she received an honours Masters of Fine Art jointly awarded by OCA and University for he Creative Arts (UCA) in the U.K. Mawby’s work has been exhibited and published in Canada, the U.S., Australia, and the U.K.