Jennifer Leigh Harrison's paintings are a story about the human condition, and intentionally, the artist leaves a lot of room for one's own projection and interpretation. Housed in her images are gestural markings and bold movements signifying embodied emotional states that become subdued, pushed back, and more a mystery than a broadcast. Layer upon layer, much like the human psyche, the artist covers up and strips back to reveal hidden parts. A classically trained psychoanalytic psychotherapist, Harrison is well-versed in working with human emotion and understands the importance of movement not only as an act of survival, but of thriving and transcending. Harrison grew up in Georgia, studied at Smith College, and now lives in the Pacific Northwest. Her journey across vastly different American cultures has given her a reverance for the land and how themes of survival and failure in nature run parrallel to the human condition.

Harrison works entirely on the floor, using her whole body as the main tool of communication for her visual language. Her raw, textured, organic compositions become a synthesis of movement and full embodied human expression, as well as a statement about the natural world's ever-changing state. Harrison has developed her own techniques working with pigment, wax, oil and acrylics. Instead of the traditional paintbrush, she uses industrial materials like metal, cloth, plastics, sanders, torches, wood, her bare hands and other found objects to apply and pull back layers, revealing what is underneath. A longstanding poet, many of her paintings have an underlayer of writing that is never excavated in the final image. Her paintings are very tactile, yet for Harrison they hold the immaterial world of the inner realm and the outer expression of that being worn and refined over time and place, symbolizing a theme of resilience and endurance, carrying a familiarity with the inner world that is both playful and agonizing, sometimes all at once.