I think it is time that I showed more of the things that I have been working on since arriving in Berlin. Recently I have had two disparate strands to my practice – unpicked and resewn canvases, and small drawings exhibited as memorabilia – which I would like to reconcile, bring closer together. To do this I have felt it necessary to step back from abstraction and go closer to my source material: landscape and the way in which we, particularly urban inhabitants, tend to consume it as an image as we travel through it. In doing so I feel that I have given myself licence to experiment without thinking that this work needs to lead somewhere, to a final piece or place.
I mentioned in my blog Materials, surface and textures that I would like my work to be read in the context of painting’s role as a window on the world, and as an object. In these - I’m not sure what to call them – sketches, trials – I have explicitly played with frames, obstructing shapes, creases, to differentiate between what is surface and what is image. Working away from home has forced me to innovate with a limited palette adding plant dyes and make-up, contrasting natural and artifice. I have bought one pigment since I arrived, Prussian Blue, an early synthetic pigment discovered by Diesbach in Berlin at the beginning of the 18th Century.
I mentioned in my blog Materials, surface and textures that I would like my work to be read in the context of painting’s role as a window on the world, and as an object. In these - I’m not sure what to call them – sketches, trials – I have explicitly played with frames, obstructing shapes, creases, to differentiate between what is surface and what is image. Working away from home has forced me to innovate with a limited palette adding plant dyes and make-up, contrasting natural and artifice. I have bought one pigment since I arrived, Prussian Blue, an early synthetic pigment discovered by Diesbach in Berlin at the beginning of the 18th Century.
Collage, dye and watercolour on recycled paper. I like the freedom the paper provides, through its absorbency, as the spread of colour wasn't completely under my control. Photograph: Bridget H Jackson
Collage, dye, egg tempera, ink, make-up and watercolour on paper. The starting point for this, and the following works, was drawings I made in the UK and brought with me. I draw when I travel, picking and repeating forms. Photograph: Bridget H Jackson
Collage, dye, egg tempera, ink, make-up and watercolour on paper. This was a drawing that I struggled with but which I feel the collage, through editing, has completed. Photograph: Bridget H Jackson
Charcoal, dye, egg tempera and ink on dyed sewn linen, pinned to a frame. Of all my experiments this appeals most to the purist in me because the fragmentation and obstruction of the image is made from folding it in on itself rather than adding other elements to it. Photograph: Bridget H Jackson
Collage, dye, egg tempera, make-up and watercolour on dyed linen. I have played with the shape and placing of the obstruction with this drawing, and intend to work further on it, sewing the blank and drawn canvas together, melding the two surfaces. Photograph: Bridget H Jackson
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