Georgie Jensen is an aspiring anthropology major at Linn-Benton Community College. She is also a multi-talented artist, focusing on textile work like knitting as well as photography, and is dipping her paintbrush into watercolor painting.
Georgie began knitting while she was living in Mexico, specifically, in the back of a van with a woman she didn’t know and who only spoke Spanish. She now creates many wearable pieces for friends and family. Among these, are many hats and shawls as well as blankets. Many of her pieces are big and intricate in pattern and colors. One of the main things she hopes people gain from her knits is that they are comfortable and cozy. Her current project is a hat for her son and her favorite piece is a big blanket she made for herself where every 10 layers is a new type of pattern and stitch. We discussed how for the majority of her projects, Georgie creates her own stitch patterns, which if you’ve tried to do this, you know it’s hard. It requires a lot of perfection and attention to detail, which seeing many of these pieces, is very well done.
While the main inspiration for creating comes from a need, whether that’s a need for a cozy addition to one’s closet or the need to create, Georgie is really interested in trying new ways to make art. She said that something she’s very interested in learning more about is weaving and spinning yarn.
Aside from making beautiful, intricate, and cozy knits, Georgie also focuses her talents on the camera. She uses a Canon Rebel T5 and with it, captures images that fascinate her. The reason Georgie got into photography was because she wanted to capture her textile work in a way that was her own, and now just prefers to have images that are her own, that she was able to manipulate and create on her own. After taking a community education class at the Chemeketa Community College, she was able to understand how to make her images look exactly how she’d wanted. Georgie said her favorite things to photograph are among nature, including incredible landscapes and patterns among the flora in the Pacific Northwest. She takes photos of mushrooms and flowers and prefers to leave scenes she captures completely alone so it doesn’t look too staged. Her favorite landscapes include ones from the Riverfront Park in Salem and the William R. Finley National Refuge natural area.
Along with using photography to create something of her own, we also discussed that she experiments with making fabric dyes using different plants like beets and butterfly pea flowers. Similar to using dye, Georgie also dabbles in painting, specifically with watercolor. She says she wanted to do something that would exercise a bit of the imperfection aspect of art: watercolor is something that’s decently uncontrolled, given its watery nature. On a postcard-size painting of a fish Georgie described that she was experimenting with color layering and said she really enjoyed just playing with ways of dropping color and letting it dry over the almost two weeks it took her to feel like the piece was complete.
