Jamie Ellen Davis

My work depicts a world inhabited by a cast of theatrical characters bound together by a loosely narrative antagonism between the pastoral and the urban. My cast of players, be they human, animal, or human-animal hybrids, range from the naively compassionate to the shockingly callous. Though a seemingly motley bunch, these characters are all unified by a shared disposition towards an almost playful malevolence. As such, it is the fate of each of my characters to end up in harm’s way; any character not currently in danger is simply a character soon to be in danger⎯danger lies only a few prints away. The world my work depicts is both tragic and comical, familiar and alien, teeming with players both cruel and kind, natural and artificial, curious and aloof, genuine and counterfeit, and therefore unsurprisingly a world not a million miles from our own.
My own story is no different. I grew up at the decidedly real intersection between the romanticized bucolic and the gritty industrial: five generations of a family-run Amish-country produce stand located in the heart of the dilapidated steel town, Allentown, Pennsylvania. I am just as much a product of this tension as are the characters populating my work, and this tension colours how both the story of my own life and that of my work have heretofore unfolded.