Watching window cleaners on the job on a high-rise building in Melbourne’s CBD sparked this work by Valender. Impressed by the cleaners’ calm confidence at a precarious height, the artist contemplated the commonness of the moment: it’s so easy to forget our fragility and vulnerability. As the cleaners descend the exterior of a building, they wipe it away to reveal a volatile sea. They are all united in their vulnerability within a changing environment.

Jen Valender is an Australasian artist and writer from Aotearoa in Narrm, Melbourne. She works predominantly with moving images, performance and sculpture to explore ethics and complex histories.

Valender has exhibited in galleries and public spaces locally and internationally, including Bus Projects, The Ian Potter Museum, Collingwood Yards and Abbotsford Convent.

Her work contemplates human fragility and vulnerability within changing environments, using visual metaphors to examine our relationship with precariousness, confidence and the commonness of extraordinary moments.

Her practice interrogates how easily we forget our vulnerability and the ways we navigate risk in contemporary life.