Featured Artist: Jeannette Breward

Written by Jeannette.

The personal photographs that I create, I shoot with the intention of creating something surreal and magical. I am so drawn to and fascinated by things with elements of the uncanny, and I like to bring that feeling into my work.

When we are young, our minds are not limited and our imagination is endless. There is a sense of wonderment present in all of us that has not yet been hindered or tampered with by reality. My passion is to harness this limitless imagination, and use it to create contemporary images that are compelling and unusual: in particular, I am concerned with our traditional definitions of the real, and with creating work that goes beyond those definitions. Much of my work is pre-visualized and then staged for the camera, yet remains grounded in the world of the visible.

I long for my photographs to stir the senses of amazement and awe that often lie dormant in the viewer, and cause them to look twice at a photograph, simply to confirm that what they saw was real. It is this dreamlike, otherworldly quality to my photographs that I most embrace. A photograph can speak in many different ways, and I strive to create images that tell a story full of emotion, magic, beauty and wonder.

The images I create carefully tread the line between what is visible to the human eye in our everyday reality, and what we can only see within our imagination. My photographs are my attempt to bring a small fragment of these dreamed worlds into existence within our own.

It also helps me to work through emotions – putting myself into my images is a way for me to express things that may be hard for me to express verbally. It’s a way to process and work through things in a way that just works for me. And it’s my hope that those images, in turn, can prhaps connect and resonate with someone else – maybe help them process something that they have been going through as well. I think art is an incredibly powerful tool and using it to bring light to issues – emotional, political, and personal – is something that is very important to me.