Jennifer Higgie

“Yet to experience wonder take time and most of lead lives that leave little room for the solitude needed to explore the parts of ourselves that are intangible or inarticulate. We live in a world that insists we explain from the time we are teenagers: What do we want? How might we achieve it? For an artist to teach at graduate level, in many countries they’re not required to have a PhD, a depressing state of affairs: to bureaucratise the arts is to shackle the wild roaming that imaginations are capable of. Why isn’t professional practice as an artist considered a qualification in itself? Over the past century, works of great innovation have emerged in response to swift change. None of it was created because it was a formal requirement. To demand a very particular kind of artistic engagement in order to allow something or someone into the hallowed halls of art history is to deny creativity its often eccentric lifeblood.”
― Jennifer Higgie, The Other Side: A Journey into Women, Art and the Spirit World

“As psychoanalysis has made so clear, human beings move through life dictated to by a mess of conscious and unconscious memories, acts and feelings. The language of art is a reflection of this: it’s one of slippages, ambiguities and contradictions that are communicated via images, which are, by their very nature, indeterminate.”
― Jennifer Higgie, The Mirror and the Palette