About

The artist and historian Jen Dixon leading a history walk along the River Rea in Birmingham.


(Jen Dixon)

W A L K I N G  :  P H O T O G R A P H Y  :

:  W R I T I N G  :  C O L L A G E

I work at the seams of things – the joints between past and present, natural and built, seen and overlooked. My practice traces, collects, and reconfigures fragments of place, language, and image, treating landscape itself as an archive. An archive not only as a collection of things, though, but the infinite possibilities of their reconfiguration. I move through landscape with curiosity and attentiveness, letting the overlooked and residual draw me into dialogue.

I have always been followed by the black dog, but I lose it in the margins, wastelands, and cut-throughs; the in-between places where you can be lost yourself. But there is method to my madness; process to my perambulations. 


(Process)

C U R I O S I T Y

I am drawn to forgotten, partially hidden, and overlooked places, walking either without a map or with obsolete ones. What begins as wandering becomes a form of inquiry – a curiosity that engages with the geography, history, and folklore of place. I observe, notice, record, collect, rework – I attend to subtle traces, small shifts, anomalies, or follow landscape lines into the unknown.

C O L L E C T I N G   F R A G M E N T S

I gather material (images, text, maps, objects) and conceptual fragments (place names, histories, folklore) – not simply for documentation but as raw materials for thinking, re-imagining, and layering new narratives.

C R E A T I N G   C O R R E S P E N D E N C E S

I care about fragments because I am piecing together elements of the disregarded. I create correspondences between fragments: a tree, a river meander, a hollow, an edgeland, crumbling concrete, a place name, a memory. These connections aren’t strictly linear or narrative – they are associative, layered, and poetic. Through them, I elevate the overlooked while respecting its everyday ordinariness.




P H O T O G R A P Y


C O L L A G E
~ An Altered River ~ Interchange ~ Brutal ~


E X P E R I M E N T S   I N   T E X T


(Conceptual Appendix)

A   C U R I O U S   A E S T H E T I C

During my PhD, I developed the idea of the curious aesthetic – a way of looking attuned to the obscured and the half-seen. Curiosity, itself, is an arousal to gaps in knowledge; the curious aesthetic is a perceptual and imaginative relationship to what lies in those gaps. My research focused on the hidden making of new kinds of objects during the eighteenth century, but the idea continues to underpin my practice today: a form of visual experience rooted in attentiveness, wonder, and imaginative gap-filling.