Pénélope Lenaerts
Instagram: @penelopelenaerts
Website: http://penelopelenaerts.com
Bio: After earning her MFA in 2021 and spending time on her practice in the San Francisco Bay, Pénélope Lenaerts moved to Occidental, CA, where she presently lives and works. She enjoys blending visual themes from the Northern California redwood forest, and traditional women’s crafting in her work, often following simple narratives of the pleasure of being softly entangled with a lover.
Statement: Pénélope Lenaerts is a multi-media artist focusing on soft sculpture and its intersections. She combines organic playful forms with small details such as interwoven fingers, folded layers and beading to reference a body in space. With a background in painting and apparel construction, she blends visual language with sewing to create narratives about the human experience- familiar and inviting forms from a mysterious dreamscape. Her smaller beaded works reference an esoteric religion and ritual that neither exists in our world nor is foreign to us. The art of impermanent craft and surface decoration, such as sewing, beading, and embroidery, is an unapologetically collective female space that is crucial to her voice. In her practice, she repeats forms, themes, and symbols to craft her own visual language with which she tells stories about memories and the pleasure of touch. Pénélope draws inspiration from artists including Louise Bourgeois and Hilma af Klimt, as well as poetry and classical English literature.
