Nancy Genn

“In a decidedly secular age, amid an art world preoccupied by more temporal concerns, the ‘spiritual’ can be a difficult subject for both artist and audience. In the West, at least, two centuries of modern cultural practice resist it. In Genn's work, however, the spiritual presence most closely resembles the unobtrusive "ordinariness" of Buddhist conduct, particularly as it has reached us through the Zen-influenced models of traditional Japanese aesthetics. There are no grand narratives, no overriding iconographies: life is only what lies directly before us, nothing can be sacred apart from that. In the made object, beauty lies, paradoxically, in mastery of craft, close attention to detail, and at the same time, surrender to process; for process does, indeed, take on a life of its own, which requires careful nurture. In Genn's work, this rather unassuming approach also suggests a sweep past modernism to art's origins in ritual and belief, in the cultural embodiment of the image as well as her own effort to synthesize, within the lexicon of the late twentieth century art, a range of moments from the history of the pictorial representation of spiritual understanding.”

– From Touched By Light by Bruce Nixon, 1997