© Catherine Jansen, Soft House Project, Xeography on Cloth, 5 room 3-dimendional environment, 1972-1981
August 13, 2025
Amie Potsic interviewed Catherine Jansen, an accomplished contemporary artist working across disciplines to explore how technology shapes perception and gives form to the poetic.
“From the beginning, my work has sought out the meeting point between the cutting edge and the timeless—the place where a new tool becomes not a novelty, but a brush for painting the intangible. Technology, in my hands, is never an end in itself; it is a language, a way to expand the space in which art can breathe.
This pursuit began with The Blue Room, now in the collection of the Michener Art Museum. It was the first life-scaled photographic environment—an image not confined to the flat surface of a print, but one the viewer could physically enter. Here, photography became architecture; atmosphere became something you could walk through. The work invited the body into the act of seeing, asking the viewer to inhabit the image as one might inhabit a dream.
From there, my vision expanded into The Soft House Project. Working with xeography—a process then more often used for the quick reproduction of documents than the creation of fine art—I constructed a five-room house at true scale. Every artifact was meticulously rendered: the furniture, the objects, the architectural details, each made entirely from layered xerographic imagery. In this space, the exterior landscape seemed to breathe into the interior rooms, dissolving the boundaries between what is outside and what we carry within. The house became not just a structure, but a meditation on the merging of environment and inner life.
Curiosity has always been my compass, leading me next into Kirlian photography, where I explored the luminous aura of living things, and into the creation of cloth-based 3D illusions that hovered between object and apparition. Each medium offered a new way to question perception, to loosen the frame around what is seen.
The arrival of digital photography and Photoshop opened another horizon. In my series 1008, the camera’s precision merged with the limitless elasticity of the digital darkroom. These works were neither purely captured nor entirely invented—they lived in the charged space between memory and imagination.
Today, my studio has expanded again, this time into the realm of artificial intelligence. I work with AI as both collaborator and catalyst, creating MP4 video pieces that animate still imagery, allowing light, movement, and sound to join the conversation. Here, generative systems become tools for fine art, carrying forward the same impulse that has always guided me: to create immersive experiences where beauty, metaphor, and meaning intersect.
Across each chapter of my work—from life-sized photographic rooms to xerographic houses, from auras on film to digital dreamscapes—the constant has been a search for intimacy within innovation. I work in that shifting, fertile space where invention meets emotion, and where the newest technologies can hold the oldest human questions.”
- Catherine Jansen
Catherine Jansen. Image courtesy of the artist.
Catherine Jansen is a multidisciplinary artist whose work explores the intersection of technology, perception, and the poetic. From The Blue Room—a pioneering life-sized photographic installation in the Michener Art Museum—to The Soft House Project, a full-scale structure made entirely of xerographic prints, Jansen transforms technical processes into immersive, contemplative experiences.
Her practice spans Kirlian photography, textile-based illusions, digital composites, and, most recently, AI-generated video works that animate still images with sound and movement. Across all media, Jansen uses innovation not for spectacle, but as a language for exploring memory, emotion, and the boundaries of perception.
© Catherine Jansen, Blue Room, Scaled to Life, 3-dimensional, cyanotype on cloth, 1969
© Catherine Jansen, Soft House Project, Xeography on Cloth, 5 room 3-dimendional environment, 1972-1981
© Catherine Jansen, Kirilian On Cloth, 24” X 36”, gridded and sewn, 2000
© Catherine Jansen, Selected Photographs from 1008 Series, digital 2’ x 4’ to 4’ x 6’ , 2020-2022
© Catherine Jansen, Selected Photographs from 1008 Series, digital 2’ x 4’ to 4’ x 6’ , 2020-2022
© Catherine Janen, Lullaby, Ai Video, 1:44 minutes, 2025
© Catherine Jansen, The Portal Between the Three Worlds; Waking, Dreaming, and Sleeping States, Ai Video, 5:04 minutes, 2025
© Catherine Jansen, The Thinnest Veils Separate The Beauties from the Beasts, Ai Video, 3:24 minutes, 2025
To learn more about Catherine Jansen visit, http://www.catherinejansen.com/2/home.html
Banner Image: © Catherine Jansen
