About Jennifer Gibney and her art

I am a Victorian artist, living near the country town of Mansfield , with an interest in working in many mediums. I have always been attracted to romantic and humorous subjects. Fine detail, pattern and rich jewel colours, gold and silver feature in both my sculpture and painting.

After majoring in drawing and printmaking at Prahran Institute of Technology I began a commercial career which included graphics, fabric design and book illustration. In the 1970’s I left the commercial art world to pursue my interest in fine art. Over the past 25 years I have developed my own style of ceramic sculpture and have had a very successful partnership with the antiquarian book seller, Kay Craddock, exhibiting a collection of work at her beautiful shop in Collins Street  Melbourne,since 1978. Consequently a lot of my pieces are related to literary themes and many of my pieces are held in collections both in Australia and overseas.

Over that time I have taken up painting in both oils and acrylic. My paintings are quite often quirky and humorous comments on ‘young upwardly mobile society’. I have developed an individual style in my painting, with ‘tongue in cheek’. Fashionable women in gorgeous fabrics with lots of pattern and colour are a favorite subject. I have attempted to portray the humorous aspects of my local community’s social interactions- women (mostly) at the races, shopping meeting friends, conducting business, enjoying a coffee or lunch and getting the latest gossip appear in my paintings. My works are a celebration of this lifestyle. Exhibitions of these works have been very popular and successful. The richness of oil paint provides the jewel-like colour and texture I enjoy working with.

More recently I have become interested in making jewellry and have lately enjoyed learning new skills at our Wangaratta   TAFE   College . I like the challenge of working in such small scale with different materials while making jewelry pieces. Dicrowic glass with its sparkling colours lends itself beautifully to create interesting pieces, often inspired by my own garden. The gorgeous dicroic glass cabochon stones are cut mixed and slumped at high temperatures in my kiln at home in my studio.