Jessie Stevenson uses the landscape as a way to explore physical and emotional energies. Built of shifting, bright colour dynamics, her work investigates a sense of place as a poetic and philosophical gesture using historical, autobiographical, spiritual, and literary sources.
Stevenson’s interplay between the edges of representation and abstraction are based on experiences, memory, writing, and ‘colour beginnings’, creating a feeling of sensory pleasure and spatial uncertainty in the work. In this exemplary painting, Far in-between, the vastness of the Norfolk marsh and light are suggested by the interconnected brushwork; the horizon is hazy and land and cloud bleed into one another, as if joined by an ethereal atmosphere.
In her work, Stevenson captures a sense of ideal beauty whilst simultaneously depicting the subtler, harsher realities that lie beneath. Shocks and surprises unfold, which she replicates through the act of painting. There is both a sense of pandemonium and paradise, the euphoric and the dark, the public and the private. It is a paradox which represents the experiential duality in life, and it is in the handling of paint itself where she tries to find them.
"I go with my gut reaction, a download of physical energy, manoeuvring my way, in a variety of actions, creating a visceral landscape at the end. Slashing, smudging, embedding, blurring, so as to create layers from the deep to the surface at the top."
—Jessie Stevenson
Jessie Stevenson (b. 1993) is a British artist based between London and North Norfolk. She studied at Central Saint Martins and the Slade School of Fine Art, where she received The Bartolomeu Dos Santos Graduate Award in 2022. She was winner of the Cass Art Prize in 2017, recipient of the 2021 Col Art Residency and The Richard Ford Award at The Prado Museum, Madrid in November 2022, for which she was awarded the prize for the best work 2022. Recent exhibitions include Broken Gleam, solo show with Berntson Bhattacharjee, Stockholm, Sweden (2022); Dreaming in Colour, group show with Bonhams, London, UK (2022); and Way Out East, solo show with Sapling Gallery, London (2021).