Ordered Experimentation

Jenny Judge in studio, 2023. Photo: Mads Colvin.

Jenny Judge’s craft-based installation Phase Transition (2023) was defined by both a simultaneous written inquiry and an encounter with a drip of paint slipping down a discarded thread in her studio. This led to experiments. Within every material is resistance, and the paint drip was no exception. Judge started observing drips of paint, initially observing the fluid properties of a liquid changing into those of a solid, a transition from one phase to another. This witnessing unexpectedly elicited a grief response; tears dampening Judge’s face mirrored the drip’s natural moment in flux. Perplexed, she returned to her writing to decipher this poignant reaction.

Jenny Judge, Phase Transition (detail), 2023. Dyed cast-plaster and acrylic paint. Photo: Louise Park.

“Of all the art forms, writing is the one that scares me the most, the angst of getting it down. Where is it going to take me?” Judge stated at a writing retreat we both attended in May 2023. Writing led her to a memory of her father’s funeral when she was 30: she recalled walking behind “the coffin up the long nave of Timothy Eaton Memorial Church” in Toronto.[1] Her father was 61 years old when he passed, the same age Judge was when she began Phase Transition. The drip of paint “touched on a lifetime of hidden grief,” she said.  

As an installation artist, Judge works with both methodological and systematic approaches to materials; her affinity to experimentation underlies her drive for order.

Jenny Judge walking through Phase Transition (installation view), 2023. Photo: Alex Montes.

This article is an excerpt and and is available in full in the Spring/Summer 2024 issue of Studio Magazine.