Jen Hubert-Beresford

Graduate Certificate of Visual Art

I am a ‘returning artist’ and ‘recovering corporate warrior’, resurrecting my art practice after a life-detour, living and working across the globe. My practice has evolved from conceptual painting to expanded sculpture using found objects and ephemera that bear traces of my own experiences, augmented with text, photography, video and audio. I juxtapose trauma and nostalgia to convey personal stories of struggle and survival.

My curiosity and my history draw me to the world of outsiders and the margins of polite society; to the scarred and the survivors. As Louise Bourgeois says, ‘Art is not about art. Art is about life.’

In The Body Remembers, 2022, I use found objects – centred on a cast iron child’s bed, circa-1910 – to contrast the state of childhood innocence with the sensation of exploitation and trauma, as relayed through unreliable memories. Bed is where we sleep, dream, fear, and fever; where we experience intimacy, trauma, narcosis, illness, recovery, decline and death. Where the body remembers what the brain tries to forget.