Over the past 3 years, since leaving Tasmania, Jen has taken her camera to the streets as a way of becoming familiar with new places and cultural expressions. The resulting body of work features her current home base in Canberra, Tasmania, Portugal where she has continuing connections with people and places, and travels in India.

Set against this background of public space, Jen’s images convey a sense of contemporary selves within changing local communities, enriched by the flow of immigration and foreign travel. She captures portraits and productive encounters amongst people as they go about their everyday lives. This focus on the quotidian reveals the diverse beauty and charm of human bodies and relationships when they are not dressed up, made up, manipulated, positioned or posed for a photo driven by some ulterior motive.

The images explore a community sensibility in which human differences are respected and normalised. They make a small intervention against the current global surge of xenophobic discourses about the perils of immigration – the dangerous invasive ‘other’ – and the politics of fear and paranoia. Yet they are, in no sense, an attempt to disregard histories of colonisation, oppression and genocide or of contemporary expressions of dispossession and violence still active in contemporary life. Simply, they foreground cultural microcosms in which WE – the diverse peoples of the earth – become visible to one another, coexist, and rub shoulders in productive, caring and playful ways.

Technically, along with her customary use of digital processes, Jen’s recent work includes experiments with cyanotype, a vintage photographic technique which uses the sun for exposure. Resulting images appear in a spectrum of blues and white, a serendipitous resonance with the Portuguese tradition of painted tiles, ‘azulejos’, depicting ordinary people going about their everyday activities. This work inspired the digital creation of paper azulejos which, via assemblages of individual images, convey a sense of place and passage.