Jessica Scriver became interested in art at an early age as a result of a family trip to Brown County, Indiana where she learned about the wood block printing techniques of her great, great uncle and master wood block printmaker Gustave Baumann. While living in Southwest Colorado, she connected with the western landscape of Gustave Baumann’s later wood block prints (he settled and ended his career in Santa Fe, NM).
Jessica Scriver recently moved back to Vermont from Colorado and feels like she has come home. The pastoral Vermont landscape with its neat rows of corn, squares of agriculture and abundant rivers, streams and lakes has proven to be a rich reference for the major theme of her work: the interplay of the telltale clean cut geometry of our human hand on the earth (think patchwork agriculture, lines of latitude and longitude and city grids) with more organic shapes (for example blood vessels, tree roots, clouds, flowing water and lakes). She often layers man-made, biological and ecological systems of organization and has developed a visual language that explores the relationship between these orders of magnitude of organization. The resulting work is at times abstract and at times recognizable as landscape.
She has a degree in biology from The University of Texas, Austin and studied art at Indiana University, Rhode Island School of Design, The New York Studio School and Vermont College. Her science background strongly influences her work and her aesthetic.