Jenni Allen is a London-based printmaker and long-standing member of East London Printmakers who works exclusively in screen print. Favouring the handmade over digital, her preferred methods of stencil-making include hand-cut paper and brush and ink on film — the physical mark of making visible in every piece. She abstracts details from architecture and natural forms, working with geometry, found imagery and texture to create compositions in which the negative space demands equal respect to the printed areas, offering the viewer what she describes as a pleasing harmony or an acceptable discord. Her work spans several distinct bodies of work: the Cells series (cell-like structures from hand-painted brush and ink positives, deliberately mis-registered), the Framework series (hand-drawn triangular grids in circular format), the Circular Matter series and the Absorb prints (inspired by phosphenes — the shifting patterns perceived behind closed eyelids). Her textile design background gives her work its characteristic repetition and pattern logic.
