JACKIE DUNHAM Art

The work centers on something I care about personally: This habitat, and the animals and insects that depend on it, are worth protecting. Land conservation and the preservation of native plant, animal, and insect habitats are intrinsic to the way I find beauty in material objects. My art making starts from paying close attention to my environment and my wish to see these places continue with diversity and health for the species that need it.

At its core, this show is about the things you love enough to keep — the things that hold meaning even when that meaning doesn't fully make sense, doesn't resolve into an explanation. A feather, a stone, a weathered shingle: kept not because they're useful, but because something in them matters enough to save.

Artist Statement

I make art with what a place gives me — everyday studies of flowers, birds or insects and whatever else arrives on my doorstep. These studies live next to assemblages made from the ordinary things that collect in a life lived close to the land. I'm especially fond of the birds of the northeast: the species that pass through or make their home in the fields, woods, and wetlands around Appleton, Maine.

This work comes out of a concern for habitat — for the specific, unglamorous acts of land conservation that let native birds, plants, insects, and animals keep their footing.

Assemblage, as a process, has taught me something about how I want to think about finishing a piece at all. Combining found objects means working with materials that already have a history and an unpredictability I don't fully control — ripped fabric, a rusted nail, a feather. The work asks to be responded to rather than dictated to. Nothing in it is really "finished" in the sense of arriving at a fixed, perfected state. It's closer to how a landscape holds together — always mid-change, shaped by seasons, weather, growth, and decay, never arriving at some final, static form. As Marc Chagall put it, "Art seems to me to be above all a state of the soul." That's the impulse behind this work — not a fixed technique, but something instinctive that keeps shifting as I do.

Here I'm thinking about art that behaves less like a finished object and more like a living habitat — layered, seasonal, incomplete on purpose, and worth protecting exactly as it is. In the end, this is a record of the things I love enough to keep — the objects, the birds, the places — the things that carry meaning even when that meaning resists being explained.

About the Artist

Jacqueline Dunham was born in Belgium and has been creating assemblage pieces throughout her life as an artist. She had a career in merchandising in NYC before moving to Maine in 1990, where she now works from her home studio. Her inspiration comes from many directions including nature and the support of the vibrant artistic community in Maine.