Sim Smith is delighted to announce Caroline Jackson’s first UK solo exhibition, This Place. The exhibition is an exploration of the artist’s intuition and investigation of paint, soaking, dripping and blurring through many forms. The nature of the paintings allow for a subject to emerge only to submerge again, in an entrancing connection between surface, colour, scale and instinct.
This Place refers to the sensation of being taken to specific landscapes, soundscapes, places, and memories when experiencing the paintings individually or as a whole. This ambitious exhibition untangles and understands Jacksons painterly language in a place that she invites us to enter.
The making for this exhibition spanned many months, with paintings being worked on simultaneously over a long period of time – this is the first time Jackson has worked in this way. One of the results of this is reflected texturally, with surfaces and consistencies that have not been explored in her practice before, emerging from deep stratums of coloured, course grounds made up of thick oil paint and oil pastel, juxtaposed by agile washes of diaphanous pigment. There are various points at which these paintings could have reached their final destination, but Jackson has pushed each piece more and more asking, what happens if you keep going past a point of comfort and of previous knowledge to one of discovery.
“I have never used so many pastels”, she remarks when talking about this exhibition. ““I have often used pastels to carve out and hold loose spaces of paint together, but in these works, pastel feels as much of a material to build as paint. It’s felt like making a puzzle, deciding which shapes might lock together, some that complement each other and others which don’t.” Unintentional marks and intuition hold these paintings together, with drawing and painting slipping back and forth, entangled over and under each other. Not only are they equal and complimentary but they give life and complexity to each other through an exchange of enigmatic energy. Natural forms start to surface through the making of the works, seemingly excavated geological visions of minerals, craters, butterfly wings or even a whole landscape. But they are also visibly made by the artist’s hand and have a certain quality of the man-made or other, possibly mechanical, possibly alien. Jackson plays with the natural, the artificial and the spatial, unmasking an amalgam of ghosts as she goes.
“I start with the bones of the piece and then build the flesh up, it rolls from there and each mark is informed by the last. Lots of things can go wrong with paintings, you have to detached yourself from wanting a specific finale.”
-Jackson, August 2024
Colour takes a central role in the paintings, it gives life to the habitat of these works. The diversity of pigment in the paintings, similar to their surfaces, is based on the perception and instinct of a painter with as much sensitivity as a desire to explore, there is no pre-determined plan at play, just a feeling. The works are directed by what feels right, particularly at the start of a piece, fluid and unspecified. The painting soon takes over, guiding paths to be composed and carved out to a more intentional ending “…a space where colour, shape and form intersecting often surging and resolving themselves in some moments and then dissolving in others.” The paintings also evoke sensory memories, the feeling of being in and amongst nature and experiencing the world from a sensory standpoint, absorbing and replicating impressions of scent, touch and light.
“With works like Brisk all I could think of when trying to title was the feeling of walking through a harsh landscape- maybe Cornwall where I always holidayed as a kid and always remember the feeling of the wind, the sideways rain, being cold, the smell of the wet shrubbery.”
-Jackson, August 2024
The sensory is explored further in the scale of these works, their extremes and their reactions on the physical body. Jackson has made her largest work to date for this exhibition, Abiogenesies – referencing the origin of life from non-living matter. specifically: a theory in the evolution of early life on earth. This work, due to its scale and layout, feels like a life span, and ecosystem evolving into life form. Made over three panels, each relating to a state of being and stages of time, past, present, future. Each panel was worked on in isolation and then brought together through a canopy of texture, interweaving connecting tendrils and bursts of rays of light. The smallest works also make up a significant part of this exhibition evolving Jacksons investigation and exploration into the extreme. The small works do not form part of the preparatory for the larger, Jackson has not scaled down her mark making. They are much simpler pieces, being informed by the larger works and not visa-versa. By taking away the scale, they are predominantly colour driven. They are very nostalgic to Jackson relating to places she feels she knows or has seen in childhood, they are precious, more intimate memories “there is one that has lots of baby pink and dark green, it reminds me of being in my garden as a kid, having BBQ’s and the smell of suncream”. Nostalgia does not play role when making but is referenced retrospectively when observing the works for Jackson, connecting the present to the past.
There is no denying that this exhibition has surfaced from deep within, with Jackson unconsciously moving, shaping and carving out mysterious spaces that we come to inhabit or feel as though we may have inhabited before. She destroys and rebuilds the works which seem to exist naturally, just like a landscape that has morphed and merged over many years. Paint and pastel are enmeshed, texture and form interwoven and yet paint is kept in its truest form “I want paint to look like paint, fluid, sheer, thick, I want to keep paint as paint, loose, I’m not trying to depict anything when painting”. Jackson’s paintings are animate; moving, metamorphosing, held together only by a structure beckoned from the subterranean.
