I started cutting traditional freehand silhouette portraits on a New Year's dare that I gave myself in 2006. This was the method used by many of the early American silhouette artists and is an extension of that living history. No tracing, no Photoshop-- just a keen eye and terribly sharp little scissors.  Though I also cut many portraits from photographs, my favorite part is sitting down with a subject. 

I'm an artist educator with over twenty years of teaching experience. I offer public and private art and craft workshops at a variety of venues including at the New York Botanical Garden through the Adult Education Program. 

Please check out my calendar for upcoming workshops or drop me a note if you would like to book a date. 

The Catskill Mountains are the source of drinking water for 8.5 million people living in New York City. Catskill Waters seeks to collect oral histories highlighting our lives here and our care for the watershed. You're invited to share your voice, too: https://catskillwaters.org/. I'm one of three principal artists who will be listening, and making art from those stories.

This is part of a series of "trashes" that I began in 2013. I gather litter from sidewalks and roadsides and then cut specimens of plants growing in those places from the paper, plastic, metals that I find there. Then I press the trash botanicals in frames and label them like natural history objects.

These are all pieces that I've created since wrapping up cancer treatment. In various ways, they speak to feelings of peace and precariousness. 

There used to be an exquisitely curated maker's shop in Rhinebeck called Wing + Clover. In 2011, Marla Walker hosted a solo show of my work called Plenty-- with woodland animals poised in classic silhouette portraits and a tumble of circular papercuttings that nodded to feather and field. 

Thicket was a show that I exhibited in the Duck Pond Gallery in 2013. It grew out of the transitions in the land around our home-- from suburban lawn, to goat pasture, to meadow and thicket. It was about watching the wild rebound and the beginnings of forest succession taking place all around us-- cedar and birch saplings dwarfed by grasses, wineberries, and bittersweet vines making their way to their futures. And my children were growing, too. 

In 2007, I began cutting silhouette portraits from green leaves and pressing them like natural history specimens. I was inspired by Hans Christian Andersen's cutting of a couple from a rubber leaf, and wanted to create a quandry between the timelessness of the silhouette form and the epemeral nature of plant material. 

Traditional style cuts in vivid repeating patterns.

In a palette of blue, black and grey repeating patterns, this collection was folk, field and feather. 

Late summer of 2011, I had the honor of spending two weeks in a collaborative residency with the poet, Ann Staley, at the Shotpouch Cabin in the Coast Range as a guest of the Spring Creek Project at Oregon State University. Ann is a former teacher of mine. Our time together culminated in Call and Response, a show of paper cuttings and poems in the Corinne Woodman Gallery. I was drawing my own hands to capture the solitude of the cabin and the connection to place in its details-- berries, feathers, cones and stories from a future old growth forest.

In August of 2015, I was diagnosed with Stage I breast cancer. It was a shock. I spent the better part of the following year making new peace with my body as I navigated surgeries, chemotherapy, and radiation. I also leaned heavily on the kindness of our community through gifts of massage, reflexology, acupuncture, support groups, and therapy.

That same year, my friend, Natasha Brooks Sperduti, invited me to co-curate an outdoor art exhibition through the Century House Historical Society. The highlights of their estate are a small museum and some industrial ruins. The room and pillar Widow Jane Mine was excavated to pave New York City streets and build canals. Our show, IN:SITE, featured 16 artists from the Northeast. I created this site-specific work for the opening and closing events. 

One of the things that saw me through some of the most difficult parts of treatment was the idea that most of the time more of your body is comfortable than not, and that you can access that comfort by bringing your attention to it. Scanning invites people to use light to explore a body that is made up of many things. Like a tattooed lady, those things carry symbolic personal weight: a fly on a jewel, a skull and cross bones, the plant from which my chemo was derived and other plant allies, a fine network of roots standing in for nerves. The negative spaces in the work allow people to project light through it with handheld flashlights onto the cave wall. As Natasha joked, "Jenny! You created a piece for the iPhone!" 

With the invasive species series, I wanted to invoke a block quilt of plants that had traveled here from other places. Some of the plants have been naturalized in our landscape for hundreds of years and others are relatively new on the scene. Some are a hazard to humans and animals, while others are beneficial to the ecosystem. They're all part of the fabric of the place: multiflora rose, wineberry, white clover, tree of heaven, water chestnut, purple loosestrife, bittersweet, giant hogweed, and knotweed.

Grist is an installation by Jenny Lee Fowler exhibited in Widow Jane Mine on the Snyder Estate in Rosendale, NY, for Eotechnic Sensorium: CHHS Projects 2017. It nods to the fragility of workers who excavated ancient seabed to make cement and left behind the great stone pillars where light is projected through the tyvek cutting. 

A year of seasons in the Hudson Valley and my dear ones from left to right. 

Hans Christian Andersen's tale of The LIttle Match Girl was one of my childhood favorites. It is a story of extreme hardship. This series is four panels highlighting each of her visions of warmth, of plenty, of beauty and her ascent with the grandmother spirit. 

Private papercutting commissions to celebrate and mark special occasions.