Who I am and What it's All About

An Artist Bio

Jennifer Boe

Here you will find neither a hard luck story, nor one of prestige and family ties.   I was born and raised around the shores of Lake Michigan.   I am an Indiana girl from a small farm town of which you have never heard of call New Carlisle, it sits between Chicago and South Bend; the home of Notre Dame.   In 1997 I came to Kansas City and four years later, with a B.F.A. in painting and Creative Writing from the Kansas City Art Institute, I decided to make this city on the prairie my home.   So, here I am a young Kansas City artist but, deep down still an Indiana girl.  

My work is a combination of the ascetics and artistic philosophy gained as a writer and painter as well as the crafts of my childhood.     I did not arrive at embroidery until a little over a year after graduation.   Lacking a studio space and the near constant feedback I was used to I decided to take a bit of a sabbatical from art making and just spend some time letting myself think and write.  

It was during this time that I had a series of epiphanies and I was horrified to find myself falling out of love with painting.   A visit to the hardware store brought home to me a fact I had known all along, that color would be reduced to a mathematical formula, a recipe that anyone could follow.   It could be produced on the spot or, in the case of embroidery floss, in lots and assigned a ridiculous name and a number.   I began to consider colors and numbers and remembered those paint by numbers and the coloring books from my childhood.   I also had a realization at that time that painting was to fast for me, to immediate.   What was the worth of something that could be produced on a whim and than obliterated just as quickly if it was not working?

This work, in this completely different medium, is heavily influenced by my mother's strange craft projects, geared around the idea of reduce, reuse, and recycle, as well as, the near annual gifts of embroidered linens from my two grandmothers.   Among my favorites were the snowy white embroidered pillow cases with tatted edging which smelled of lavender or cedar.   Most all of the fabric I use for my work, I have purchased from estate sales and I consider them collaborations between myself and another unknown artist.