Sunshine Coast textile artist, sculptor, mixed media artist and art therapist Jean Bennett graduated with a degree in fine arts from Goldsmiths, London, and a Doctor of Practice in Arts Psychotherapy from the University of Derby, UK.
Bennett invites audiences to engage with her work sensorily, through touch; enticing a sense of wonder and connectedness. Her highly sophisticated techniques in working with natural and synthetic fibres, encaustic and mixed media, result in an evocative sense of history, antiquity obscuring the boundaries between artifice and authenticity.
“Art is about revealing the hidden. It is a way into other realities and other personalities. It is a way of looking at something differently, a form of intervention. Touch is the act of contact between two objects. Tactility is the quality of the touched surface. The body is the medium through which touch and tactility come together. Touching an artwork kindles different memories, feelings, associations and images than seeing, enriching the experience of it. Touching a sculpture provides different sensory information and expands what is perceptually possible.”
Image: Jean Bennett, TOUCHED (installation detail), 2023/4, Jesmonite, flex metal and fibre, Dimensions variable
