Jenna Tatham and Mother Expressionism
I first met Jenna Tatham at the opening of Eros and Ashes at Spazio Sassetti last May, and after the usual introductions the painter invited me to visit her creative space on via dei Serragli. I took her up on it, and Jenna was generous enough to show FUL her work — some of it still in progress — and to answer a few questions for the magazine.
Your background brings together some remarkably fascinating worlds: the discipline of sight-size drawing at the Charles Cecil Studios in Florence, your studies in Theology and Religion at Oxford, and — going back further still — a decisive encounter at the age of four with the art of Dalí at the Museum Ludwig. How do these very different selves come together in your path, and how have they shaped the artist you are today?
Standing in front of Salvador Dalí’s La Gare de Perpignan at four years old is one of my earliest memories, and certainly my first encounter with a work of art that pressed itself into my psyche. Years later, all I could recall was an overwhelming luminosity, the vastness of the canvas, and a figure falling through the sky. My mother told me she left me standing there for a long while as she wandered through the rest of the museum. Looking back, I can only describe it as finding a vision to rest inside.
There was something strangely comforting about that surreal world, a place where I could disappear. As a child I was fortunate to be surrounded by art, and I drew almost every day alongside my older sisters. In many ways, I have always inhabited an imaginative realm running parallel to the visible one.
My years at the Charles Cecil Studios offered a very different gift. Though I had started studying academic drawing at thirteen, the intensity of daily practice sharpened my eye, taught me patience, and gave me confidence in the language of oil paint. More importantly, it cultivated in me an understanding of the flow of light, the rhythm of form, and the beauty of the body’s natural contours.
It taught me to step back again and again, to see a painting as a unified organism, and to understand how every single mark contributes to the movement of the whole.
At the same time, I was becoming increasingly aware that I was building a technical foundation for ideas that reached well beyond representation. My fascination with religious traditions, mythology, philosophy, and metaphysical questions was becoming inseparable from my practice.
My interest in the intersection of spiritual literature, science, and mysticism has shaped my work since my A Levels, when I first encountered the Buddhist concept of the Stream Enterer and began using water as a visual metaphor for surrender. In Sufism, Neoplatonism, Buddhism, Taoism, and certain strands of Christian mysticism, water surfaces again and again as an image of unity and emanation, expressing how individual forms arise from a greater whole and remain inseparable from it.
Before devoting myself fully to the figure, I experimented with abstract, sea-inspired paintings that tried to act as energetic mirrors. I then moved toward depicting a body dissolving in a contemporary reimagining of Ophelia in 2022 — a narrative I meant not so much as a story of physical death as of the dissolution of the ego.
I spent time traveling alone in Indonesia, where ashram life and mantra meditation became part of my daily rhythm. During that period I also visited Villa Vrindanava in the hills above Florence, whose collection of sacred art left a deep impression on me. One quote that stayed with me is from Niels Bohr:
“The fact that religions through the ages have spoken in images, parables, and paradoxes means simply that there are no other ways of grasping the reality to which they refer. But that does not mean that it is not a genuine reality.”
Rather than seeing myths, symbols, and religious imagery as primitive attempts to explain the world, I began to be drawn to them as sophisticated languages capable of expressing realities that exceed ordinary speech. My desire to deepen my understanding of the philosophical and theological foundations of Buddhism and Hinduism grew steadily, eventually leading me to apply to study Theology and Religion at the University of Oxford in 2023.
As I prepared my application, I became particularly interested in the historical conflict between patriarchal monotheisms and older, nature-bound traditions — a tension I believe still echoes today in the imbalance between masculine and feminine principles, spirit and matter, and in humanity’s destructive, violent relationship with the natural world.
While researching feminine archetypes, I was struck by how autonomous women appear again and again as dangerous figures across mythology and the history of religions. Whether goddess, widow, witch, or temptress, female independence is so often bound up with forces that must be feared, controlled, or demonized. This became an enduring thread in my practice. My paintings do not simply try to depict women, but to restore a balance. I understand the feminine not only as a gender identity, but as an elemental principle of creation, dissolution, intuition, embodiment, and transformation.
In January 2024 I was offered a place to study Theology and Religion at Harris Manchester College. At first I was overjoyed and accepted the offer. Yet when September came and it was time to take out the student loan, I found myself unable to go through with it; my whole body rebelled, and I couldn’t ignore the fact that this was not my path.
It was an extraordinary opportunity, but I realized I was seeking an authority to validate my voice — institutional permission to investigate questions I was already exploring through my creative practice. To abandon my creativity and ignore the true direction I was being guided toward would have gone against everything I had begun to believe in, so I took a leap into the unknown.
More recently, while working on my latest collection of paintings, I found a book at the market on the early Christians and the Byzantine world, full of depictions of sacred places and objects. I was genuinely inspired by the juxtapositions of color, and yet for me these structures symbolize the severance between humanity and the sublime.
Built in an age when faith was used as a weapon to control populations, the church positioned itself as the point of access to God, and a personal, direct relationship with the divine was viewed with suspicion. So I draw on the undeniable beauty of these structures, but I try to dissolve them; because nature is my altar, my body a priest, and I see the divine flowing freely through all things.
In this sense, art, philosophy, theology, and even quantum science have never felt separate to me. I see them as different modes, methods and languages for approaching the mystery of existence. They ask how we relate to the invisible, how symbols or conceptual maps give shape to what cannot be put into words, and how we might rediscover wholeness within an interconnected world.
Today I still take in a great deal, but I hold back from trying to translate ideas directly into paintings. Inspiration leaves its immeasurable traces, and yet it is the ground, rather than the guide, of what emerges. I like to think of it as light passing through a kaleidoscope.
Looking at your work, there’s a distinctive handling of the medium: you lay down color, then “strip” and dissolve it with turpentine, letting chance and intuition play their part. In the process, the boundaries of the human body dissolve, merging with natural elements like tree bark or running water. How do you experiment with these techniques, and what does this total fusion of body and nature mean to you?
My painting Decaying Sapling (2024) marked a turning point in my practice. It was the first work in which I moved away from a predetermined collage composition toward a process of gradual layering, letting the image emerge slowly as I experimented with diluting oil paint until it became translucent, almost with a watercolor quality.
I was first drawn to these possibilities through the work of Helen Frankenthaler and her soak-stain technique, as well as the paintings of Hu Jundi, whose oils often carry the luminosity of watercolor. Beneath the final surface of Decaying Sapling lie several earlier compositions, including an entirely abandoned painting and a self-portrait of me standing among trees, which I later covered over to create two perspectives of the same tree. The title refers to the simultaneous coexistence of the seed and the oak. It reflects an eternalist conception of time, in which past, present, and future coexist within a single field of existence.
From there, I began to develop a process of removing color with turpentine whenever a composition felt too defined or resolved. Fully resolved forms often seemed to obstruct the movement or energy of a painting, so I would partially dissolve them, letting fragments remain.
I place great value on these traces as testimonies to the painting’s evolution. They hold the memory of structure while remaining ambiguous, inviting the viewer’s imagination to complete what has been left unresolved. I’m continually surprised by the forms people discover in these passages — a little like watching the images that appear and vanish in moving clouds.
Underlying this process is the idea of entelechy, the Aristotelian concept of the unfolding of an intrinsic potential. I see painting, like the way I choose to live my life, as an act of surrender to this unfolding. Rather than imposing an image onto the canvas, I try to listen, respond, and let the work become what it wants to become. Each painting develops according to its own internal logic, which means no two are conceived in the same way.
And yet each painting becomes a testimony to transformation: an energetic imprint of lived experience, distilled through the body and expressed through pigment.
Humming Bark (2025) began the day before I made the first mark, when I found myself weeping among the branches of my favorite tree in Florence. As I rested there, I became intensely aware of the tree’s presence. Its bark seemed to vibrate in the fading light and, rather than simply appearing brown or rust-colored, it was wrapped in a soft lilac mist as the sun set. My phone had died, so instead of taking a photograph I stayed inside that experience, letting it press itself in as an emotional and visual memory. That moment became the source of the painting. I’m fascinated by dichotomies, by moments of spaciousness in which seemingly opposite emotions coexist; in this case, the dance between grief and gratitude.
Roots of Breath began from a similar place. Its first layer was an inner landscape: a blue field holding a tree whose roots seemed to metabolize the blue into golden branches. Six months later, I returned to the same canvas and painted a nude torso over it. The skin is veiled so finely that the subterranean tides shine through in transparency. The chest became the site of that transformation because it’s there that I most viscerally experience emotional passage: through the breath, I feel a deep reverence for letting go.
I was born in a bathtub, so I often joke that I’ve spent my life trying to return to the water. I realize how consistently water has shaped my experience. I grew up in the Pewsey Vale, then lived in Cologne, later near the river Kennet in Marlborough, and now in Florence, where the Arno has become part of my daily life. From the age of four I spent a couple of weeks a year sailing, and I have always found a deep sense of calm by the water; I’m in love with Impressionist scenes that depict water, and I felt compelled to convey that quality through my work.
The fusion of body and nature that recurs throughout my work is therefore less symbolic than experiential. I don’t perceive human beings as separate from the natural world, but as its expressions. Just as rivers, trees, fungi, and weather systems take part in continuous processes of transformation, so do we. Allowing bodies to dissolve into bark, water, roots, and landscape is my way of painting this underlying continuity. It reflects the conviction that the boundaries we perceive between ourselves and nature are often conceptual rather than real.
On your website you introduce a powerful, deeply personal concept: Mother Expressionism™, a philosophy that sees existence as a perpetual flux, a constant metamorphosis between creation and dissolution. How did this manifesto come about, and how does it translate visually when you stand before the canvas?
Mother Expressionism was not conceived overnight. It’s the culmination of years of artistic practice, philosophical inquiry, and personal transformation. This philosophy draws on many sources: Heraclitus’s vision of reality as perpetual flux, Jung’s process of individuation, the mystical traditions that emphasize surrender, and the intrinsic wisdom of the natural world itself.
I’m interested in the idea that each of us contains an innate potential seeking expression. Like a seed becoming a tree, we continually unfold into what we already are. Looking back, I see that I’ve always circled the same ideas through different languages: painting, sustainable fashion, spirituality, psychology, and movement. Eventually I realized they were all expressions of a single underlying philosophy.
In 2020 it felt as if I resurfaced for air after years caught in an undertow. I found the greatest contentment in solitude. Paradoxically, I was less alone than I had ever been, because I discovered an affinity with minds that had lived across the millennia. I immersed myself in ideas around epigenetics, intergenerational trauma, and generational healing. I was fascinated not only by how we inherit stories, wounds, adaptations, and survival strategies from our families and cultures, but also by the practical ways we can free ourselves from these inner fortresses.
Still, it was lived experience, more than theory, that inspired and sowed the seeds for what is now my practice. Working with tools like breathwork, EFT tapping, and mantra meditation, together with the profound simplicity of running free in the woods and along the river of my hometown, brought me back to childhood wonder. There was a subtle irony in finding peace in the very landscape I had spent years planning to escape.
At its core, Mother Expressionism is an embodied philosophy. It emerged from a growing awareness that transformation happens not only through thought, but through somatic healing and the harmonizing of the mind-body connection. Although many of the motifs I use arise from my own experiences, they point to something collective. Through connection, expression, and conscious action, we gain the capacity to rewrite inherited stories, dissolve unconscious patterns, and cultivate new ways of being. I firmly believe the revolution begins in the body.
I spend a lot of time researching the stories of saints, mythological figures, and goddesses — not to recreate them, but to awaken in myself those aspects of the feminine that have been hidden, feared, or condemned; to understand what the true strength of feminine power looks like, a vision that drives me forward. I see the power of storytelling: tales set or dissolve the boundary of what we believe possible, and it’s important to make these stories our own. Painting has become an act of weeding and cultivating my inner garden. It has meant recognizing where I had inherited shame around my sensuality, and understanding that it was never truly mine.
Growing up and into adulthood, I became increasingly aware of what it meant to be sexualized and, at times, dehumanized; to feel my body reduced to an object of desire rather than lived as something I inhabited from within. I carried the belief that expressing my sensuality was somehow incompatible with being respected. Much of this journey has been about learning to tell the difference between authentic intimacy and the pull of a desire projected from the outside.
It was through this gradual transformation that Mother Expressionism emerged. Less an aesthetic and more a way of being, it was born from the desire to cultivate a nourishing place to rest — an environment conducive to growth, both within myself and in the paintings. I can’t speak of Mother Expressionism without speaking of the community I’m part of. Nights spent dancing with other women, poems written in a moment of reflection, and the simple act of witnessing one another have become as much a part of the practice as the painting itself.
Brigitte Alberghini Davis wrote:
“How could I not dance so the rain waters my sister’s garden? You water mine so well.”
For me, these words capture something essential about Mother Expressionism: that our flourishing is not separate, but shared. You can travel to the ends of the earth or spend months in silent retreat, but more often than not what we need is to be lovingly seen and held, both by ourselves and by a community. It’s such a simple thing, a return to something tribal and deeply human, and yet it feels increasingly rare in contemporary culture.
From the perspective of art history, Mother Expressionism stands in the lineage of both Abstract and figurative Expressionism. Like the Expressionists, I’m interested in art as a vehicle for inner transformation rather than mere representation. My practice is, in many ways, an exercise in entelechy. When I stand before the canvas, I try to step aside and let the work become what it wants to become.
Though the process is deeply intuitive, it’s rooted in observation. I often begin with reference photographs — whether images from mythic fashion editorials I’ve art-directed, photos taken by friends, or studies of the body. More recently, I found great inspiration in The Nude: A Photographic History, a collection of nude photography from 1817 onward. These images offer starting points rather than destinations.
And despite my training at the Charles Cecil Studios, my approach to building the figurative form owes more to Leonardo da Vinci than to the rigid sight-size tradition. Rather than immediately fixing the contours, I work through a process of searching lines, allowing form to be discovered through movement and fluidity.
As the painting develops, I move away from description toward sensation, letting the body dissolve into landscapes of water, bark, light, and movement. The figure is never fixed, but forever becoming. For this reason, dance has become an integral part of my daily studio practice. Before I make the first marks, I need to feel free, fluid, and fully expressed. I follow the rhythm, the movement, and what I can only describe as a life force moving through the image. The painting reveals itself alongside me.
Florence is universally known for its Renaissance aesthetic — geometric and idealized. Your painting, by contrast, celebrates imperfection, fluidity, and the cycle of time. What does it mean to you to live and create in a city with such an imposing history? Is it a stimulus, a contrast, or an underground source of inspiration?
I feel more at home in Florence than I would in any modern metropolis. There’s enough beauty here to sustain me, having grown up surrounded by nature. Living here has deepened my appreciation of architecture as something more than a functional shelter. Though not biophilic in the contemporary sense, its architecture reflects many of the same principles: human scale, organic materials, visual richness, and a profound harmony between the built environment and the living world.
In Florence you only have to remember to look up. A ceiling opens into a fresco, a carved cornice catches the afternoon light, a sculpted figure emerges from a façade. There’s always another layer of beauty waiting to be discovered, if you remember to pay attention. That attention has become part of my practice. Florence has taught me to see more slowly, and that way of seeing has shaped not only what I paint, but how I paint it.
The more time I’ve spent here, the more I’ve realized that it’s not only Florence’s visual language that resonates with me, but its philosophical one. I’ve come to understand that my artistic worldview shares much with the Neoplatonic currents that shaped Renaissance Florence. Like the thinkers of the Florentine Platonic Academy — Marsilio Ficino in particular — I see artistic creation as a spiritual act. Beauty is not merely decorative; it’s a means of elevating consciousness and orienting us toward something greater than ourselves. I also share the Renaissance affinity for allegory.
Classical myths, religious narratives, and archetypal figures often find their way into my work — not as illustrations of dogma, but as living symbols that help us navigate periods of transformation. I’m interested in what images convey: what they amplify, propagate, and make imaginable. Every aesthetic decision carries a philosophy, consciously or unconsciously.
What I love most is that this legacy hasn’t vanished. Florence is not only a city of inherited ideas, but a living creative community, continually drawing people who bow to Venus. Some of my greatest sources of inspiration here are the artists I’ve met. Conversations with photographers, sculptors, musicians, poets, and artisans have continually expanded the way I think about image-making.
Their ways of seeing have enriched mine, and the exchange of ideas has become as important to my practice as the hours I spend alone in the studio. There’s something in Florence that still encourages this kind of cross-pollination. The city feels small enough for disciplines to overlap naturally, yet rich enough that every encounter carries the possibility of opening a new way of seeing. In this sense, Florence is less a contrast and more an underground source of inspiration.
My paintings may embrace fluidity, impermanence, and transformation, but they arise from a similar desire to explore the relationship between the visible and the invisible, matter and spirit, the individual and the whole. Perhaps where I differ from Renaissance imagery is that I’m less interested in perfection and more in becoming. My work embraces dissolution as much as form, process as much as completion. And yet even this can be felt in Florence, where the Renaissance humanists understood that art could take part in the ongoing cultivation of the human spirit.
Cover and photos: ©Riccardo Svelto
https://www.jennatathamart.com/
