About

Hayley Samantha Jensen

is a New Orleans based visual artist, gardener and teacher. Originally from the New Orleans area, Jensen received her BFA in Studio Art from LSU and later went on to receive her MFA in Studio Art from San Francisco Art Institute, where she received the Outstanding Graduate Student Award and the Younhee Paik Scholarship. After graduation, she received a year long residency at Artworks Downtown in San Rafael, CA. Since returning to New Orleans, Jensen joined the artist collective The Front and received a January 2023 artist residency at The Aquarium Gallery and Studios. She has worked as a painter for animation film productions, event fabrication, window displays, and murals. Jensen additionally worked with local farms (Baby T-Rex Farms in New Orleans and currently Cicada Calling Farm in Hammond), florists, and other gardeners in the New Orleans area. Currently, she helps run a wholesale flower nursery outside of Birmingham.

“My paintings are rooted in the awe and joy I find in building a relationship with the natural world. Using a playfully animated style, I create abstracted painted landscapes in conjunction with repurposed plastic materials. Subverting the imagery to the synthetic confronts environmental destruction with the re-enchantment of nature. In documenting the joys of farming, guerilla gardening, learning of native species and weather patterns, I find a radical thrill. Additionally, in painting natural disasters, environmental anxieties, and dying ecosystems, I grieve for all that has already been lost. 
By using repurposed synthetic materials as my surface, I highlight the politics of plastic and how the material harms the environment and ourselves. The land I portray on these materials of death are an attempt at transforming my anxieties into a kind of liberation through play and learning. I am additionally using plastic as a symbol for humanity’s nature deprivation. The separation I felt and still do feel from the natural world is present in everyday life, and by building this relationship through curiosity and creativity I am slowly feeling the weight of separation begin to lift. 

My most recent projects were a series called Recognizing Home: Cypress Series and another called Growing in Bits. Recognizing Home: Cypress Series focused on my monochromatic studies of the bald cypress trees present in Manchac Swamp. The bald cypress serves as a symbol of death in many cultures while it serves as a haunting state symbol protecting the deteriorating coastline of southern Louisiana. My project Growing in Bits served as a way for me to use the plastic scraps and metallic bubble wrap I collected from jobs, friends, farming, and personal use and to link those plastics to my immersion in gardening and farming. Both acts of collecting plastic and working the land helped me in facing environmental anxieties that have haunted me since Katrina. All of my work is based within building my relationship with land, specifically the Gulf Coast, and challenging the politics of plastics and the mentality of separation.”