Jen Aitken makes sculptures and drawings that relate to her immediate urban environment. She arranges geometric volumes, planes, and negative spaces into forms that both tempt and resist recognition.
Aitken is widely known for her cast-concrete sculptures, in which stacked and cantilevered architectonic forms seem to morph from different viewpoints. Initially drawn to the material for its density and crude presence, Aitken continues to find emotional resonance in the way that concrete grounds her abstract forms in real space and time.
Taking up the more imaginative space of scale models, Aitken’s three-dimensional wire drawings that suspend from the wall have a delicate presence that emphasizes human touch. Her two-dimensional ink drawings portray a shallow pictorial space, marked out by careful outlines of incomplete or impossible sculptures. The unprocessed quality of her materials as well as her restrained formal vocabulary engage all of her work with its architectural surroundings, wherever it is situated.