About
My work is about the ongoing, shifting and inescapable relationship I have with the place in which I grew up. I am interested in the influence that our early environment has in the formation of identity and the importance of connecting place and locality to our continued sense of self. I regularly return to the places of my youth to experience and document them as they are today. This is also a point of departure for making artworks. Experiencing a memorable place afresh can inform, challenge or re-invent our existing perception or understanding of it.I was born and grew up in Guernsey. The Channel Islands are rich with military history which never ceases to fascinate me or inspire my practice. Uniquely, this was the only British Territory to be occupied by Germany during the Second World War. Adolf Hitler was so obsessed with the Channel Islands that he ordered their conversion to ‘a permanent and impregnable fortress’. Although the Channel Island defences formed only a fraction of the Atlantic Wall, they absorbed an inordinate amount of resources in proportion to their size and relatively un-strategic value. In fact, by 1945 and the end of the war, in terms of land, sea and air defences, the Channel Islands can be considered to have been ‘the’ most heavily fortified place in the world.
Decommissioned post-war, and viewed as painful reminders of symbols of soldiery by locals, attempts were made to remove them completely but this largely failed due to their sheer bulk of 1.5 and 2 metre plus steel-reinforced concrete, and so were left abandoned. Ironically their only battle now is with the elements - erosion and their gradual decomposition back within the landscape. It strikes me as deeply poetic that their quiet structural ‘wearing-away’ is re-forming the very land – the sand upon the beach headland from which, in-part, they were built from and upon. Some have become practically unrecognisably, partly covered or completely hidden by dense undergrowth. This natural camouflage is so much more successful than any human attempts at artificial concealment at the completion of their construction. This assimilation into the natural environment has become a metaphor for failure and defeat.
Building contractors identified the bunkers’ potential as solid foundations on which to construct residential buildings such as bungalows and houses. And two and a half decades after its de-commission, on one of the sites of the four huge gun emplacements known collectively as ‘mighty’ MIRUS, (which was the largest-calibre gun battery installed in the Islands), a school was built. I attended this school called La Houguette from age five to eleven and this formative time brought the opposing dynamics of childhood innocence and the architecture of war together within the playground. This conflicting and troubling relationship has been a consistently developed theme throughout my work.
My paintings predominantly feature the architectural landscape of Guernsey’s west coast where I played and explored as a girl. Views up the beach from the waters edge at low tide evoke memories of stolen glances away from the innocence of rock pool adventures. Beyond a foreground of sand and seaweed debris - the outcome of a recently violent storm (an allusion to a dark historical past or a hermetically-sealed present?), massive blocks of granite to keep out the sea, and steel-reinforced concrete anti-tank walls to keep out a non-existent enemy, partially conceal domestic and military buildings. Our view-point is that of the enemy as we approach from the sea. A first encounter from out of the ‘no-where-ness’ of the ocean’s abyss, to ‘some-where’, a periphery, an appearing and disappearing no-mans-land that is the beach. Generally devoid of human activity, the buildings themselves become anthropomorphic. Within this eerie stillness these buildings meet our gaze. Are they warning, imploring, or coaxing us in? Whatever our response, the barrier of the wall prevents us from going any further- an emotional as well as a physical boundary. These paintings imply the passing of time and threaten to reveal something unbearably disturbing. They convey a sense of moral as well as ecological decay.
Recent concerns have explored the more illicit relationship between community and environment - teenagers and derelict buildings; graffiti, illegal parties, sex and drugs.
Jeni Snell. April 2010.
Jeni studied MA Fine Art at the University of the Arts London, Central Saint Martins College of Art & Design between 2006-7 and BA (Hons) Fine Art at The School of Art, Design, Media & Culture, at the University of Sunderland between 1995-99. Jeni lives and works in London.