Mother Expressionism™
My practice reflects a process of surrender into entelechy, of playing with mystery. I myself am taken on a journey as I paint.
I often begin with a figurative reference, but beauty emerges as forms dissolve.
I thin paint with white spirit, stripping images back, then slowly build them up again, following the movement of brushstrokes, rhythm, and life force. Through this process, I am surprised.
The painting reveals itself alongside me.
In painting, the body becomes a site of transformation. Skin, bark, yonic forms, flowers, and landscape exist as one living field, unfolding in perpetual motion.
It embraces elemental beauty over perfection, honouring the raw intelligence of natural form rather than the flattened, consumable image of the feminine.
People exist as trees — a wrinkle like a ring of bark — forms shaped by time, weathering, growth, and decay.
The work seeks to venerate the body beyond social conditioning around ageing, returning it to something elemental, sacred, and alive.
Through my multidisciplinary practice, I have come to understand that I am continually reflecting one central philosophy: Mother Expressionism.
Rooted in a Heraclitean understanding of reality, Mother Expressionism approaches existence as fluid, relational, and perpetually becoming.
At its core it is an embodied philosophy which seeks to restore the feminine as a force of creation, dissolution, and agent of transformation.
IN PAINTING
a process of surrender into entelechy
ABOUT THE ARTIST
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Jenna Tatham is a multidisciplinary artist from Wiltshire, currently based in Florence. Her early exposure to fine art came at the age of four, when she vividly recalls standing before La Gare de Perpignan at the Museum Ludwig, where she spent part of her early childhood. She later studied Art, Design and Media Practice at Kingston School of Art before moving to Florence to train in traditional master oil painting techniques at the Charles Cecil Studios.
In 2024, she was offered a place to study Theology and Religion at University of Oxford, a field that continues to inform the philosophical and spiritual undercurrents of her practice.
Alongside her painting practice, Jenna is the founder and creative director of Ancient Innocence, a vintage fashion and creative project rooted in sustainability, storytelling, and Modern Romanticism. Through reimagined vintage garments, natural fibres, and archetypal imagery, the project extends many of the same themes explored in her paintings — transformation, myth, femininity, and the relationship between beauty and consciousness.
Her paintings explore personal and collective transmutation through the symbolic language of nature. Figures dissolve into water, bark, flowers, and waves of energy, expressing a vision of unity beneath apparent form and an awareness of the transient nature of existence. Through layered brushwork, shifting colour relationships, and fluid movement, Jenna navigates the threshold between matter and spirit, the tangible and intangible, exploring the dualities that shape human experience.
Her work approaches painting as both a devotional and transformative act. Water recurs throughout her practice as a symbol of surrender, memory, and becoming — a space where identity softens and reconnects with something larger than itself.
Jenna has exhibited across the UK and Florence in both solo and group exhibitions. Her solo exhibitions — When The Stream Walks on The Shore, Dual Currents, and Subterranean Tides — form an evolving thread within her practice, exploring immersion, ecological consciousness, emotional alchemy, and the fluid relationship between inner and outer worlds.
