2024 Senior Exhibition Artists

J Nowell

Concentration: Art + Design: Integrated Studio Arts

About J Nowell

J Nowell is an undergraduate student pursuing their BFA in Integrated Studio Arts at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, specializing in graphic design, illustration, and photography.

Statement

The form my work ended up taking is a zine exploring my relation to art and design, depression and creative burnout, the emotional toll of perfectionism, and the challenge of letting go and making peace with failure. An earlier, ill-fated incarnation of this project grew so daunting that the fear of my work not living up to its concept paralyzed me. Upon reminding myself that this project is only one step in my creative journey, not the end-all-be-all, I refocused and stripped my ideas down to a more manageable scale. At the advice of my professor, I bought a sketchbook and resolved to put pen to paper every day, building a routine of making art for its own sake. I formed digital collages consisting of these sketches, as well as a number of photos I took along the way and various other mediums I played with— in one case, I used a scanner to create distorted images of my face, printed them out, then crumpled them to resemble mountains and took pictures of them from below. Enlisting my friend Kiera to help write the accompanying text, we created a mythology around the creative process, personifying the concept of perfection as a wrathful deity and building a narrative around the struggle to free oneself from its control, as well as the feelings of uncertainty and fear that entails.