Welcome to Skewed North
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.
Off course. On purpose.
Hi, I’m Jolene.
I’m an artist, writer, scenic painter, photographer, maker, traveler, 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.
What You’ll Find Here
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.
I write about:
loss and what comes after
home, moving, and the places we land
memory and the strange things we carry with us
art and why we make things
reinvention and becoming someone new
people I meet who are finding their own way through change
the beautiful, messy business of starting over
Some of these stories are becoming my memoir.
Others are happening right now.
But they all belong to the same world.
This Is Probably for You If...
You’ve ever looked around at your life and thought:
This is not where I thought I’d be.
Maybe something ended.
Maybe something began.
Maybe you lost someone, moved somewhere new, changed careers, fell in love again, became a caregiver, turned an age you weren’t prepared for, or simply woke up one day and realized the old map didn’t fit anymore.
You don’t necessarily need someone to tell you what to do next.
Sometimes you just need to know someone else has stood there too.
That’s what I hope these stories can do.
The Atlas
Most of Skewed North is free to read.
Paid subscribers get access to The Atlas—the layer underneath the stories.
It’s where I share pieces of the creative process and the larger world I’m building: memoir fragments, photographs, notebook pages, things that didn’t make it into an essay, behind-the-scenes material, works in progress, audio, and occasional stories I want to share with a smaller circle.
The essays are the stories.
The Atlas is everything underneath them.
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.
Start Here
If you’re new, you don’t need to begin at the beginning.
Pick a story.
Follow whatever catches your attention.
That’s pretty much how I got here too.
Welcome to Skewed North.
Off course. On purpose.
