Jenny Lewis

FESTIVAL SPEAKER

Jenny Lewis is an award-winning multi-disciplinary artist. Having been an editorial portrait photographer for twenty-five years, her expansive lens-based practice now incorporates poetry, collage and installation. Lewis creates a visual dialogue challenging the patriarchal narrative of the female experience. She is interested in themes of transition, loss and re-connection, disrupting and reassembling the language and constraints of photography. Her current work navigates and confronts challenging aspects of selfhood, subverting the more traditional genre of portraiture.

Lewis’s projects have been extensively exhibited nationally and internationally in both institutions National Portrait Gallery, London, Open Eye Gallery, Liverpool and Photo 22, Melbourne as well as a range of permanent public art presentations in community Spaces, Such at the Britannia Leisure Centre and Shoreditch Trust Centre. Her works are part of collections including the National Portrait Gallery, The Welcome Collection, Birthrites Collection, The Tate Library and The Womens Library Glasgow. Her work has been supported by The Arts Council with a DYCP Grant and Project Grant. Her current series was shortlisted for The Ampersands/ Photoworks Fellowship in 2023.

In addition, she has published three monographs with Hoxton Mini Press. She is also a mentor within the photography community, lecturing and running workshops nationwide for universities, community projects & art institutions.

Her work is rooted in a profound and intimate relationship to her community which she has been part of for 26 years. The series ‘One Day Young’ celebrates women the day they gave birth. Shot in their own homes, the portraits bring visibility to new mothers and this life-changing transition while diluting the negative narratives surrounding birth.

Hackney Studios explores the connectivity and network required to sustain a creative practice in a collaborative project that saw each artist recommend the next participant. The series offers a complex look at the vibrant creative community in East London while also revealing the impact and pressure of relentless gentrification.

In One Hundred Years, Lewis documented 100 people, 100 years, in one community. This moving collection of stories from Hackney residents at every age, from birth to 100, is not simply a portrait of a neighbourhood but a powerful reflection of the deep sorrows, fierce joys and many contradictions that make up our lives. Lewis’s portraits reveal her subjects in their own homes, workspaces or local environs, creating historical documentation of the way we live.

Lewis is currently working on a new body of work, ‘UnBecoming.’ For the first time, she is turning the camera on herself in an intimate untangling of her experience living with a chronic invisible illness while simultaneously navigating the unknown territory of menopause. For Lewis, holding space for this transition into midlife is political. These themes remain taboo—both in the art world and wider cultural consciousness—and in centering them, she seeks to dismantle this tension and create a discourse that brings these often hidden topics to the fore.