PENELOPE JENCKS To create the emotional impact she wants from her larger-than-life sculptures, Penelope Jencks has chosen an unusual viewpoint - that of a three- or four-year-old child. Jencks has been creating oversized sculptures that depict middle age and older naked adults for years. And the precise reason she makes them this large is so they have the same relationship to the viewer as her own parents and parents' friends did to her when she was a child. They need to be monumental to give them the same importance within the landscape. "I want them to be viewed from the perspective of a child's vision of an adult figure. Monumental like a force of nature. The series has to do with the nudity, or even nakedness one might say, that prevailed on the beaches that my parents went to in the 40s. It was not exactly flaunted, there was always a certain decorum. But my parents and their friends considered it more "natural" to swim or lie around on the beach without any clothes to hinder them, and once they were out of sight of the naked eye (binoculars were ignored) they would shed their clothing and carry on with their intellectual wranglings about Beauty, Truth, Wittgenstein and Whitehead. I remember noticing, as a tiny child, how odd and different these monumental bodies were from my own more streamlined, tidy version. The Beach Series II is an effort to capture this oddness, and allow the viewer to see, hopefully even to experience, some of those same sensations that I had as a child when confronted by the naked otherness of the almost mythical 'grownups.' In order to convey this 'otherness' I have made the figures monumental, somewhat fleshy and 'older.' The viewer should have the same perspective that I had as a child, looking up into the mysteries of the aging body." She is clear that it is not her intent for the viewer to consider her works either nudes or naked, they are, she says, merely who they are, people who have no interest in "covering up." And from her child's perspective they were not only natural but "huge, like a mountain or a tree." This current exhibition, "The Beach Series II," consists of photographs taken by Jencks in which she has "installed" her monumental sculptures in situ. Although the actual sculptures are made of plaster, and are ready to be cast in bronze, they could not be safely installed long term outdoors. But by "conceptualizing" them in a variety of settings -the dunes, the beaches, the Outer Cape ponds - and then photographing them, the viewer can experience the phenomenon of these unclothed male and female swimmers and sunbathers as they would have seemed to the eyes of a child. That is to say both completely natural and yet monumental in the surroundings.
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