Full Bio

Jennifer Mygatt Tatum is a Sonoma County-based visual artist whose work explores the insight and perspective gained through time spent in nature. Through her art, she reveals how nature’s textures and rhythms align us with our innate inner wisdom. Her practice is best known for interpreting her Wandering Women motif through metal, paint, print, and mosaic.

The Wandering Women motif transcends the specific representation of women and instead becomes a lens through which to examine the world within and around the human experience. Inspired by the forest and its quiet revelations, Jennifer selects materials that best express the seeds of ideas awakened during her walks in nature.

In June 2023, she undertook a self-driven 30-day artist retreat by the sea in Denmark. Immersed in solitude, surrounded by neighboring forests and the rhythmic presence of the sea, she created Essence of Place, a body of work that marked a new chapter in her creative journey. This series consists of five large water-soluble graphite pieces, capturing a dance between discipline and gesture. Light, time, and the subtleties of place became central to this reflective work, fueling her continued artistic exploration.

Upon returning from Denmark, Jennifer revisited the familiar trails of Tahoe’s burnt landscapes, where the Caldor Fire had transformed lush forests into haunting spires of charcoal. Walking these trails, she collected charred bark and, in an act of renewal, transformed it into paint. With this material, she recreated the forests as they once stood— a poignant gesture that honored both nature’s resilience and its cycles of destruction and rebirth. Each painting, rendered from the ashes, tells a story of survival, transformation, and hope.

Inspired by the patterns of the charred bark, Jennifer began exploring Mokulito printmaking—a form of lithography using wood. Birch ply panels became her canvases as she visually interpreted the intricate textures and stoic beauty of the burnt forest. Through this process, she found a profound reminder that beauty can emerge from destruction, shaping her vision and guiding her hands.

Jennifer’s multidisciplinary practice spans sculpture, printmaking, painting, mosaics, and large-scale public art. Her materials—wood, wire, clay, mosaic, glass, paint, and ink—are selected intuitively, one medium informing and inspiring the next. This fluidity allows her creative process to evolve organically, bridging the gaps between mediums and ideas, much like nature itself. Through her work, Jennifer Mygatt Tatum invites viewers to pause, reflect, and reconnect with the timeless dialogues between the self and the natural world.