BA (Hons) Fine Art: Painting
Polly Jacksonâs work draws inspiration from her Christian faith. She grapples with the absurdity of believing in an unseen God and existentially battles with her doubt in a post-enlightened world of reason, secularism and science through painting. Whilst faith is rationally unexplainable, Polly provides an insight into what she believes and experiences daily through personal visualisations of her faith. Her paintings are designed to hold up a mirror to the viewer by sparking philosophical encounter and self-questioning. She endeavours to transcend the barriers of language and move into spiritual realms- beyond the rational and known- to convey a Christian reality, which points to the unknown and irrational. Pollyâs recent work began with an intrigue over some very old photographic negatives of her family, which she developed herself in black and white. As she painted from these photographs, the colours and the âpresentnessâ of the painted mark âresurrectedâ her ancestors, giving them new lease of life in the contemporary art world, although they were in fact dead. Consequently, within the works, there exists a temporal dichotomy between the transience of humans, and the phisically much longer life of art. The time Polly spent in Madrid remains extremely influential to her practice. Whilst there, she absorbed many monumental and dramatic classical paintings by artists such as Goya, El Greco, Velasquez... In particular, she became interested in a group of Nineteenth Century paintings in the Prado museum, which all contained a lament over death in some way. The protagonists of the paintings are depicted between life and death, travelling a passage from one state of being to the other. In the painting moment, their death is suspended, lingering and imminent, but finely balanced, not yet tilting. It is this fleeting moment between life and death that interests Polly and fuels her artistic psyche, perhaps because she believes there is far more than what we can see or comprehend, than the rational or the known. For more please see: http://pollyannajackson.blogspot.co.uk/ http://pollyjackson.wordpress.com