Jenny MacKendrick: Just Get On With ItThere's a moment in Jenny MacKendrick's first blog post where she describes being asked by her ceramics lecturer what a piece covered in chickens was about. The fast food industry? Animal welfare? Late capitalism?
"No," she said. "I just like chickens."
It's a small story, but it tells you everything about Jenny MacKendrick and why her work matters. In an art world that often rewards the most elaborate explanation over the most honest instinct, Jenny has quietly, and not always easily, chosen the other path.
Jenny lives and works in North Somerset, maintaining a practice that refuses to sit still. Painting, drawing, pottery, zines, animation, illustrated books, ideas arrive as drawings or feelings and find their own way to the right material. A canvas. A mug. A small, strange printed character who simply needed to exist. She studied Drawing and Applied Arts at UWE Bristol, where she discovered both a love of the metalwork room and a deep suspicion of the idea that everything must mean something.
It is in her paintings that her visual language feels most fully realised. The Space Confectionery series, her own description is "large-scale, mixed media dopamine hits for your walls", is exactly that. 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 appear. Sleeping cats hold their ground. The works feel immediate, generous and alive — yet there is restraint beneath the surface. Negative space breathes. Marks are given room to land. An artist who knows precisely when to stop.
Then there are the Weird Guys: a cast of characters, drawn, printed, papier mached, quietly multiplying across sketchbooks and Instagram, described on her website as "relatable friendly friends." They are funny, a little odd, and possess the specific quality of seeming to understand you. Jenny calls them weird guys with real affection, and that affection is returned.
Her zines carry the same spirit. Hand-made and printed in small runs, with titles like My Favourite Stationery, Monday Night Pottery and The Incident, they are part sketchbook, part story, part love letter to whatever Jenny is currently obsessed with. Her pottery, hand-built, characterful, warm, brings the energy of her drawings into clay without forcing it. Everything connects. Nothing is overexplained.
What makes Jenny's practice genuinely interesting is not just the work itself, but the honesty with which she talks about making it. In Just Get On With It — her first blog post, written in February 2026, dictated hands-free while folding laundry, she writes with disarming candour about creative paralysis, undiagnosed autism and ADHD, and the years she spent believing that without something profound to say, she had no right to say anything at all.
"I absorbed this idea," she writes, "that if I didn't have something deep and meaningful to say, I shouldn't say anything at all."
It's a feeling many makers will recognise. The internal audit before the first mark. The comparison. The quiet conviction that someone else has already done it better, said it first, made it matter more. Jenny traces hers back to university, where she watched peers receive the best grades not necessarily for the strongest work, but for the most elaborate justifications. She found the whole thing absurd, and then, despite finding it absurd, let it silence her anyway.
What broke the silence was a friend's offhand remark: "Do you think the second person who ever opened a café thought, 'Oh no, I can't open a café because cafés already exist'?"
Obviously not.
Jenny MacKendrick is making things because she can't not. She is drawing animals — mostly dogs these days, though it used to be chickens — and getting obsessed with colours and making pottery on Monday nights and writing blog posts while folding pyjamas off the floor. She is not waiting for a grand manifesto. She is not producing statements about the ineffectual grief of late capitalism. She is making work that is warm, funny, formally considered and emotionally open — qualities that are, in the end, much harder to pull off than profundity.
Her website says she'd like her funny art to leave you feeling warm and fuzzy.
It does.
"No," she said. "I just like chickens."
It's a small story, but it tells you everything about Jenny MacKendrick and why her work matters. In an art world that often rewards the most elaborate explanation over the most honest instinct, Jenny has quietly, and not always easily, chosen the other path.
Jenny lives and works in North Somerset, maintaining a practice that refuses to sit still. Painting, drawing, pottery, zines, animation, illustrated books, ideas arrive as drawings or feelings and find their own way to the right material. A canvas. A mug. A small, strange printed character who simply needed to exist. She studied Drawing and Applied Arts at UWE Bristol, where she discovered both a love of the metalwork room and a deep suspicion of the idea that everything must mean something.
It is in her paintings that her visual language feels most fully realised. The Space Confectionery series, her own description is "large-scale, mixed media dopamine hits for your walls", is exactly that. 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 appear. Sleeping cats hold their ground. The works feel immediate, generous and alive — yet there is restraint beneath the surface. Negative space breathes. Marks are given room to land. An artist who knows precisely when to stop.
Then there are the Weird Guys: a cast of characters, drawn, printed, papier mached, quietly multiplying across sketchbooks and Instagram, described on her website as "relatable friendly friends." They are funny, a little odd, and possess the specific quality of seeming to understand you. Jenny calls them weird guys with real affection, and that affection is returned.
Her zines carry the same spirit. Hand-made and printed in small runs, with titles like My Favourite Stationery, Monday Night Pottery and The Incident, they are part sketchbook, part story, part love letter to whatever Jenny is currently obsessed with. Her pottery, hand-built, characterful, warm, brings the energy of her drawings into clay without forcing it. Everything connects. Nothing is overexplained.
What makes Jenny's practice genuinely interesting is not just the work itself, but the honesty with which she talks about making it. In Just Get On With It — her first blog post, written in February 2026, dictated hands-free while folding laundry, she writes with disarming candour about creative paralysis, undiagnosed autism and ADHD, and the years she spent believing that without something profound to say, she had no right to say anything at all.
"I absorbed this idea," she writes, "that if I didn't have something deep and meaningful to say, I shouldn't say anything at all."
It's a feeling many makers will recognise. The internal audit before the first mark. The comparison. The quiet conviction that someone else has already done it better, said it first, made it matter more. Jenny traces hers back to university, where she watched peers receive the best grades not necessarily for the strongest work, but for the most elaborate justifications. She found the whole thing absurd, and then, despite finding it absurd, let it silence her anyway.
What broke the silence was a friend's offhand remark: "Do you think the second person who ever opened a café thought, 'Oh no, I can't open a café because cafés already exist'?"
Obviously not.
Jenny MacKendrick is making things because she can't not. She is drawing animals — mostly dogs these days, though it used to be chickens — and getting obsessed with colours and making pottery on Monday nights and writing blog posts while folding pyjamas off the floor. She is not waiting for a grand manifesto. She is not producing statements about the ineffectual grief of late capitalism. She is making work that is warm, funny, formally considered and emotionally open — qualities that are, in the end, much harder to pull off than profundity.
Her website says she'd like her funny art to leave you feeling warm and fuzzy.
It does.
