Jennifer Trouton

Golden Fleece Award

Jennifer Trouton lives and works in Belfast, Northern Ireland. For over ten years her work has considered the metamorphosis of the Irish landscape and its architectural heritage, engaging in a form of domestic archaeology that centres on the way aspects of our personal histories, and the often overlooked banalities of human existence, are written into the spaces we occupy.

She has focused on depictions of patterned wallpaper and fabrics, playing on their comforting familiarity to tell broader stories of class warfare, diasporas brought about by economic circumstance, and the women who have borne the brunt of societal changes not of their making. Her large-scale representational paintings utilise an academic trompe l’oeil style but, through a subtle manipulation of historical iconography, they resist being defined as ‘traditional’. Using tools and materials of the past her intention is to use the familiarity of still life painting – frequently dismissed as female, domestic or romanticising – to engage with viewers on a multitude of levels and in the process subvert the ideology and technology of our time by challenging the notion that painting is dead. She is interested in how visceral, messy and slow painting is in a world full of virtual images.

Jennifer Trouton applied for a Golden Fleece Award to build on the momentum she generated by beginning to work on significantly larger-scale paintings, rather than series of smaller multiples. It would pay for studio space, materials, part-time childcare and several research trips to wallpaper collections in the V&A Museum, London and Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester.