Conservatory, by Jenna Packer

Description

Jenna Packer studied both history and art at Canterbury University. She is nationally recognized as a significant player in ecological art. Her delicately painted visualisations expose underlying ideologies and power structures, both political and cultural. She draws on the fine detail of the first colonial topographical artists to reference how their art was advertised to show  prospective settlers, the lie of the land and its potential for profit. She is particularly concerned with the place of the small-scale individual within the large-scale system and the ways that large-scale change is constructed by those individuals. Sometimes this may occur in a large work, sometimes large and small-scale works complement each other. In this work we compare a nature that grows of its own accord and a curated, prepared environment.