Harvest
12-25 May
We are pleased to present Harvest, an upcoming exhibition by Jenna Packer, opening at ARTIS Gallery on 12 May.
Each year, Jenna Packer and her family gather to harvest apples, press juice, and put down cider. Though her sons now live some distance away, they return home with their partners, joining neighbours for a day of shared labour, fresh juice, last year’s cider, and a long communal lunch. What began as practical work has become ritual — a marker of time passing, seasons returning, and family coming together.
These new paintings place figures at the forefront, a shift within Packer’s wider practice where people often occupy layered symbolic or narrative spaces. Here, the personal and the political meet directly. They speak of love, family, community, labour, and the enduring connections between people, land, and season. In uncertain times, they honour the modest acts that continue to bind us to each other and to nature.
Alongside these large figurative works are smaller landscape works, where figures appear near roadside apple trees — trees sprung from discarded cores, remembered stops on journeys, and quiet symbols of sustenance. Whether improvised holiday camps or shelters in harder times, they become stories of belonging, resilience, and place.
Integral to Packer’s practice is process itself. In painting these scenes of everyday activity, she draws on the stillness and harmony of Italian frescoes, where composition and softened colour create balance and calm. Her study of traditional Buon Fresco technique in London informed a contemporary acrylic approach that uses reflected light beneath thin layers of pigment, creating a gentle luminosity and sense of fragility. Marks remain visible, surfaces pared back, decisions exposed — paintings that hold both immediacy and honesty.
Featured artwork: Cider Apples II
