Regard this fleeting world like this: Like stars fading and vanishing at dawn, like bubbles on a fast-moving stream, like morning dewdrops evaporating on blades of grass, like a candle flickering in a strong wind, echoes, mirages and phantoms, hallucinations, and like a dream.

— The Eight Similes of Illusion from the Prajna Paramita Sutras- The Buddha



Jenn Shifflet is an interdisciplinary artist exploring the contemplative and poetic realms of luminosity, color, and the fleeing qualities of life, as mirrored by the natural world. Her work speaks of dream-like realms, fleeting moments of refracted light, and abstracted reflections of the natural world. Themes of sky, impermanence, alchemy, perception, the feminine, layered time, and reflection guide her creative process.


Shifflet’s work is a meditation on the dissolution of boundaries between self and nature; a place where sky-like gradients mirror luminous inner worlds. Organic forms dissolve into fluid pathways veiled by ethereal mists, watery drips and orchestrations of light. She embraces the immaterial through the blurred lines of ambiguity, formlessness, and ethereality. Auras of light transform the physic stains and shadowed sediments that have settled through experience and time.


Shifflet’s process balances intuition, control, freedom and chance. Choices of materials often work with light to create moments of perception: reflective, transparent, iridescent, and refractive pigments. Mediums made fluid through watery pours and drips elevate a feminine wisdom that wears down and tempers hard edges. Time unfolds slowly through endlessly layered transparent compositions that create a saturated, spacious, and luminous depth through gradated color.


The art historical influences of Shifflet’s work include Northern Romanticism, the Light and Space movement, Chinese and Japanese traditional landscape painting, and spiritual abstraction. Personal influences reflected in her work are a Buddhist and yogic practice, daily walks at dusk, and a near-death experience. These have led to a visual language of a beauty that is held within the profound fragility of impermanence. It’s a recognition that all is so fleeting. In a world that is burdened by struggle on so many levels, her work inspires us to take a break from the chaos of the outer world, to to pause, slow down and rest for a moment of contemplation.