Jill Sorensen
Driven by a fascination with the ever-evolving range of industrial materials available to artists, Jill has mastered the encaustic medium, overcoming traditional issues of durability by experimenting with chemicals to harden the surface.
Born in Thames, Jill Sorensen completed her Post-Graduate
Diploma at Auckland University's Elam School of Fine Arts in 1995,
after gaining a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of New
South Wales. In 2002, she received a Master of Fine Arts with 1st
Class Honours from Elam.
Jill's body of work encompasses installation, encaustic
painting and most recently figurative painting and drawings. Driven
by a fascination with the ever-evolving range of industrial
materials available to artists, Jill has mastered the encaustic
medium, overcoming traditional issues of durability by
experimenting with chemicals to harden the surface. The results of
her efforts in encaustic are works of art with a resilient,
plasticized colour and texture creating emblems of the connotations
of the synthetic in the modern world. "Open any woman's magazine
and you will be confronted with pages of fake smiles on endless
perfectly made up faces. Is this the smile you make when you do not
have available, or cannot afford, a real one?…In this way the smile
becomes faux; held up as an object of desire in a glossy magazine
it becomes more desirable than the smile it references…"
(Sorensen)
Aside from working as an artist, Jill is a tutor at
Whitecliffe College of Arts & Design and has been nominated as
a finalist in major NZ art awards such as the James Wallace Art
awards, Telecom Art awards, Waikato Art awards and the Norsewear NZ
Contemporary Art Awards.
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