Jenny Potts Barr

+Tool Box creation+ JOOOne/joooLIE/AUGHust/Cept

 
These have been my 'toolbox' months. I have been deep diving and thinking about my toolbox as a visual artist.  Organising my 'plugs, globs and verious weel nuts' (photo by JPBarr 2025 Wellstead Museum). Handwriting is a gesture, mark making is a gesture of the hand, same same in my head.

I admire the dedication to order and phonetics in this shed at the Wellstead Museum in Bremer Bay. When you grow up with different spoken versions of the English language vowel pairings can then be arranged in many different ways in your head before you even open your mouth, and it’s usually never the correct one that escapes your mouth!

We all have specific tools and quirks and I’m learning that you make it work for you. Stephen King wrote a book called ‘On Writing. A memoir of the craft‘. At the start of the section called “THE TOOLBOX” he says ” I want to suggest that to write to your best abilities, it behooves* you to construct your own toolbox and then build enough muscle so you can carry it with you. Then, instead of looking at the hard job and getting discouraged, you will perhaps seize the correct tool and get immediately to work” pp125.

(*great word choice)

These photos are part of an ongoing series of Museums and ‘wunderkammer’ private collections I come across in regional areas of WA. All photos done with a Leica DLUx7.

Where has 2026 gone?

I have been working away in my new studio, getting a feel for its layout and building up my painting habits-closing the gap between drawing and painting. I've been rejected from most applications that I've put in for = prizes/residencies/local shows etc, but the words of Samuel Beckett keep me company "...fail harder'. 

I'll just be painting in the little shed next to the house 🙂

‘Paper Works’at Gallery THS, Margaret River.April 2026

Artist Statement for Paper Works, a group show. 
'You can always find a piece of paper and something to draw with wherever you are. I like papers transportability, it’s bare minimal requirements- eyes/hands/implement and I’ve used oil crayons for over 25 years. They are easy to buy, quick, colourful, you can execute a line or block of colour . I first came to using them whilst I was living in a small fishing village in the Philippines and I was in the local shops looking for art supplies. 

The drawings in ‘Paper Works’  have been completed after morning swims from memory when I’m back in the studio. They are abstractions of the act of swimming. The portrayal of water is a formal problem that I am always tackling in someway. I definitely see swimming and drawing as being one and the same.'
Exhibition runs from all of April 2026.

Gallery THS is a new artist run initiative in Margaret River. Here's me on duty in the gallery space reading.... Find the space @gallery_ths on insta.

Painting by Ana Young in Australian Abstract by Amber Crewel Bell.

Digital Drawings of Sea Weed and Sea grasses from Cowaramup Bay, WA.

A sample of my Vector drawings from 2024.

Tools – Leica Dlux7/Adobe Fresco/Apple Pencil/ Illustrator and initial seawrack studies in pencil on paper.

Revisiting oil paint.

In 2024 I spent 8 months in the Stables studio space at The Farm in Margaret River.  My sole aim was to begin painting again after a hiatus of almost a decade. I chose quick tactile accessible materials and worked from my collection of sea wrack studies and photographs that I have been collating since 2022. 

The language of the weather and daily observations are recorded on the works, details such as swell size, swell direction and/or lessons.

Melaleucas Beach, Cowaramup Bay.
April 2024

Duende

LessonVIII_detail_oilonpaper_jpbarr2024.

The Farm, Margaret River.