About

Hayley Samantha Jensen

is a New Orleans based visual artist and teacher. Originally from the New Orleans area, Jensen received her BFA in Studio Art from LSU and later went on to receive her MFA in Studio Art from San Francisco Art Institute. Since returning to New Orleans, she has worked as a painter for animation film productions, event fabrication, window displays, and murals. She additionally works with local farms, florists, and gardeners in the New Orleans area.

“Employing a painting style inspired by cartoons and maximalism, I depict visions of land, water, and weather often on plastic, creating a playful lens where the grand mystery and sublimity of nature are blurred into wild abandon. My practice is an act of curiosity, visual questions posed to process the overwhelming joys and tragedies of our interwoven relationship with the organic and the manufactured. Through material, color, gestural mark making, and graphic outlines, my work mirrors this connection.

Rendering abstracted bioscapes onto plastic surfaces, I highlight the bond between the natural world and the synthetic confines we situate ourselves within; a simultaneous existence. I paint the entities that I feel both deeply a part of and entirely dissociated from, much like my relationship to plastic. These synthetic materials provoke and complicate viewer expectations, subverting the surface imagery into complex depths of interconnection. Tragedy and abundance are both numbed when synthetic maximalism pollutes the ability to process.”