North is supposed to mean direction. But my life has never moved in a straight line.
For more than 25 years, I’ve been paid to paint things that don’t exist.
Cities that were never built.
Wood that’s actually marble.
Entire worlds designed to make you believe you are somewhere else.
That’s the strange thing about working as a scenic artist: after enough years of building imaginary worlds, you start paying attention to the real ones.
The houses we live in.
The things we carry from place to place.
The stories we tell ourselves about where we’re headed.
And what happens when none of it goes according to plan.
Because life doesn’t follow the script.
People leave. People die. Houses change. Plans collapse. We move, begin again, become people we never expected to be.
And somehow, we make a life out of it.
That’s what Skewed North is about. What we make of ourselves, our stories, and our lives when things don’t go according to plan.
Hi, I’m Jolene.
I’m an artist, writer, scenic painter, widow, and chronic starter-over.
For most of my adult life, I’ve made things.
I’ve painted sets for movies and television, built rooms that existed for only a few days, made art, photographed places, moved more times than I can count, traveled far from home, lost people I loved, rebuilt houses, rebuilt myself, and repeatedly found myself standing somewhere I never expected to be.
Eventually I realized that almost everything I make — and almost every story I want to tell — is about the same thing:
What do we do with what happens to us?
Skewed North is where I try to answer that.
Not with advice. With stories.
The biggest moments did not come from plans because, well, I had none. They came from the wrong turn, the strange yes, the thing that made no sense, the room I entered by accident, the country I followed someone to, the job I did not know would become a career, the grief I did not know how to survive, the beauty that found me anyway.
I don’t follow maps. I make them.
Some stories begin on film sets. Some begin in childhood. Some begin with my husband dying. Others start with a house, a mural, a box I haven’t opened in ten years, a woman I meet while traveling, an old photograph, or something small that suddenly makes the past come rushing back.
Some of these stories are becoming my memoir. Others are happening right now. But they all belong to the same world.
Skewed North is for the off-course ones. The ones rebuilding. The ones grieving. The ones making beauty from the wreckage. The ones who feel something pulling them but do not have language for it yet. The ones learning to trust the direction that looks strange from the outside but feels true from the inside.
About the Work
Skewed North is only one part of what I make.
Outside these pages, I create paintings, photography, environments, murals, community art projects, and other work exploring the relationship between people, place, memory, and identity.
For years I created worlds for other people. These days, I’m much more interested in the worlds we build for ourselves.
Welcome to Skewed North.
Off course, on purpose. Hop in the sidecar. We ride at dawn.
New here? Start with these stories.
