Jennifer L. Boyer

About the Artist

I've always enjoyed making things but I fell away from it in my 20s, although I flexed creative muscles when it came to writing and photography. It was only in my mid-30s—paradoxically a time of both stagnancy and seismic changes—that I reclaimed the makery part of myself and wove it into my life as a kind of therapy. In my 40s a friend and I started selling our art at a few dark/indie craft shows each year. I still struggle at times to reconcile myself with the word "artist." Yet I take to heart the American Visionary Art Museum's description of the kind of outsider art they display: "...art produced by self-taught individuals, usually without formal training, whose works arise from an innate personal vision that revels foremost in the creative act itself." That's the best description of how I feel, especially since I have no formal art training and I don't even work in the arts. What I make--whether people consider it "real" art, or even art at all--comes from some indefinable wellspring, sometimes unbidden, sometimes conjured. It's the creative act itself that electrifies me, regardless of what it produces.

Artist's Statement

Every winter, when the temperature drops below freezing, I set out plates and bowls of water on my condo balcony and let it freeze overnight. Sometimes I embed objects in the water (model train figurines, a skeletal leaf, etc) or stick rocks in the water to create holes. A few times I made rusty water and froze it. I generally don't interfere with the freezing process, but occasionally I do add boiling water to the ice to generate cracks. I also snap icicles off my car and add them to the mix. When conditions are optimal, I dye the resulting ice and take macro photos of it. I use different color combinations of dye, sometimes blending colors to create new tones. I shoot at different focal lengths, albeit all with my macro lens. The end result is rather abstract and it's always interesting to hear people remark that this one looks like an angiogram, or that one looks like the silhouette of a face. It's a bit of a Rorschach effect at times. I never know what I'm going to get with the ice and I love that unpredictability. Each photo ends up being different from the next.  My motto with it is always: "Look closely: you can see an entire teeming universe in the bubbles, cracks, and fissures that appear in ice." Each piece of ice is its own magical world and I try to coax out different views of those worlds via the dye and focal length.