Bundanon

Jen Webb is a Canberra-based poet, born in Cape Town, South Africa, and who lived for extended periods in New Zealand and Canada before moving to Australia in 1991.

She holds a PhD in cultural theory, and a DCA in creative writing, and is a professor at the University of Canberra. Both her scholarly and her creative work focus on creative arts: how the arts fit within contemporary society, and the role of creative work in wellbeing and meaning-making. She’s an established editor, and an award-winning writer, and is widely anthologized and translated. She also produces poetry as artist books for installations (often in collaboration), and has been exhibited in galleries in Australia, New Zealand, and the USA. Her most recent poetry collection, The Daily News (2024), traces the environmental and social difficulties we lived through from 2019 to the end of the COVID crisis.

In Residence at Bundanon

During my residency I will be using my creative practice – poetry, artist books – to clarify and illuminate what it is to be a part of a complex and constantly changing living environment. I will be immersing myself in the Bundanon collections, buildings and landscapes, and responding to them by way of pencil sketches, photographs, poems, and small texts. The outcome will be an artist book that riffs off the concept of a Book of Hours, its individual pages illuminated with visual and written materials that record and reflect on the passage of time across each day.