Jenny Maxwell

Biography

Jenny Maxwell is a London-based artist, writer and educator. A PhD candidate and graduate of the MRes Art: Theory and Philosophy at Central Saint Martins (2018), her work moves between writing, performance and experimental research - expanding Autotheory (Fournier, 2021) as an embodied mode of performative life writing through which to explore the metaphor of composting as a practice for making art in troubled times.

Seeking to unsettle the binaries between human/nonhuman, birth/death, growth/decay, her practice gleans from and adds to ‘the heap’; a fleshy constellation of research-creation. Drawn from a topography of disciplines 'the heap' explores the restless state of lifecycles through a perpetually entangled state of flux. By employing a creative-compost methodology, this project’s disturbed edges (Kimmerer, 2016) seek to go against the hegemony of traditionally Western, sovereign-centric, scientific thinking, to present a fluid, feminine, speculative ‘queer-ecological-ecriture’. A practice which is impossible to ‘catch’, ‘pin down,’ or ‘resolve’ - but which, instead, celebrates the eternally illusive nature of its permeable liquidity through its ever (r)evolving ‘turns’.