Etsy

My shop: http://palimpsestic.etsy.com/

You can learn more about me at:

http://twitter.com/jhtatroe
http://www.jennifertatroe.com
http://jennifertatroe.blogspot.com

I'm a collage artist and Pushcart-nominated short fiction author with roots in central Illinois and northern Colorado. I recently returned to my home in Windsor, Colorado after several years in Seattle.

My collages are highly textural pieces made with oil or acrylic paint, cheesecloth, silk, string, wax, and other common objects - ordinary things made extraordinary with ephemera from times past. As I create my larger pieces, I imagine the characters that go along with them.

Our lives are going paperless. We communicate by text and email. We pay our bills online. We read books on Kindles and iPads, sent to us in pristine bits and bytes. No one touched our ebooks before us—not even to pack them in boxes or line them up on a shelf. We don’t touch them either. No one touches them at all.

In this digital world, I find myself pausing in awe each time I get the opportunity to hold a piece of history in my hand. These things would once have been insignificant—an old matchbox label, a lottery ticket, a book in which a woman wrote her name. Today, they are magical remnants of a time that is quickly fading from memory.

I hope their magic carries into the art I make with them. These inconsequential items bear the weight of history. They ask to be touched. They beg for connection, for their stories to be imagined, invented, and then told. I tell them or, at least, parts of them. I combine artifacts with words, paint, dye, paper, and textiles to create a palimpsestic context for the objects that brings out both their inherent beauty and their potential narrative.


I have purchased on Etsy under the name jhtatroe.