Jenny MacKendrick
Jenny MacKendrick lives and works in North Somerset, maintaining a practice that moves freely between painting, drawing, pottery and sketchbooks. A graduate of Drawing and Applied Arts at UWE Bristol, she approaches each idea instinctively, letting it find its own form, whether that becomes a canvas, a zine, an animation or a wheel thrown ceramic. It is in her paintings, however, that her visual language feels most fully at home.
MacKendrick's work carries a restless, generous energy. Fluorescent pinks, acid yellows and electric corals bloom across raw canvas; ink drifts into soft atmospheric clouds before being interrupted by delicate linework, looping scribbles and dandelion-seed forms that read like fragments of a private alphabet. Small creatures and sleeping cats surface quietly within these abstract spaces, bringing warmth and wit without tipping into sentimentality.
What distinguishes her practice is the balance between spontaneity and restraint. The paintings feel immediate but never careless. Negative space breathes. A cartoon-like figure may sit beside a Rothko soft veil of pigment, held in place by an artist who knows precisely when to stop.
Humour and playfulness run throughout, most affectionately in her recurring cast of "weird guys", yet there is formal discipline beneath the surface. MacKendrick treats joy not as decoration but as a serious aesthetic position, holding lightness and depth in equal measure. Her paintings offer something much contemporary abstraction tends to avoid: emotional openness without naivety.
These are works made for living with. They animate a room without overwhelming it, carrying colour, warmth and what feels like interior weather.
Generous, instinctive and unmistakably her own.
Jenny MacKendrick lives and works in North Somerset, maintaining a practice that moves freely between painting, drawing, pottery and sketchbooks. A graduate of Drawing and Applied Arts at UWE Bristol, she approaches each idea instinctively, letting it find its own form, whether that becomes a canvas, a zine, an animation or a wheel thrown ceramic. It is in her paintings, however, that her visual language feels most fully at home.
MacKendrick's work carries a restless, generous energy. Fluorescent pinks, acid yellows and electric corals bloom across raw canvas; ink drifts into soft atmospheric clouds before being interrupted by delicate linework, looping scribbles and dandelion-seed forms that read like fragments of a private alphabet. Small creatures and sleeping cats surface quietly within these abstract spaces, bringing warmth and wit without tipping into sentimentality.
What distinguishes her practice is the balance between spontaneity and restraint. The paintings feel immediate but never careless. Negative space breathes. A cartoon-like figure may sit beside a Rothko soft veil of pigment, held in place by an artist who knows precisely when to stop.
Humour and playfulness run throughout, most affectionately in her recurring cast of "weird guys", yet there is formal discipline beneath the surface. MacKendrick treats joy not as decoration but as a serious aesthetic position, holding lightness and depth in equal measure. Her paintings offer something much contemporary abstraction tends to avoid: emotional openness without naivety.
These are works made for living with. They animate a room without overwhelming it, carrying colour, warmth and what feels like interior weather.
Generous, instinctive and unmistakably her own.
