Josie Jenkins

Josie Jenkins - April 2014

Artist’s Talk by Josie Jenkins

7pm - Friday 25 April 2014

FREE ENTRY

Starts at 7pm on Friday 25 April 2014

The talk will focus on the prizewinning painting

Geograph Collage with Paperclips

and the direction of Josie’s new work since winning

the Valeria Sykes award, but also outline how

previous work has lead her to where she is now.

Click her for more details.

Places are free but if you wish to find out more

or book a place at the talk please mail

nic@corke.net or txt or call 07773 287827 with

your name and the number of tickets you require.

22 March - 25 April 2014

An exhibition of work by Liverpool based visual artist, Josie Jenkins, exploring the actuality and the disorder in our landscape the way human interference impacts upon our natural landscape and nature’s resultant effect on the man-made. The exhibition includes examples of past and recent work by the artist. Read more ....

Jenkins’ previous work has focused on the 'edge lands' between city and countryside, the visual consequence of heavy industry and overgrown wastelands or forgotten places with discarded objects that once had a purpose but have now become semi integrated with their surroundings. This preoccupation determines her choice of imagery which she emphasises to achieve her primary concern, which is to highlight the subtle incongruity between the natural and unnatural.

Jenkins has extended these themes further to created the ‘England Lost Me’ series of paintings which overlay similar imagery with pattern and fantastical elements. This series includes Jenkins’ painting ‘Geograph Collage with Paperclips’ which won the Valeria Sykes Award in the New Lights Art Prize and will be on display in the gallery from 6th April.

The exhibition will also include some drawings and examples from a series of work titled ‘Deadwood’ which uses old discarded pieces of wood to make free standing paintings which become objects in their own right.

When making a painting or drawing, Josie seeks to communicate her chosen themes by obscuring some objects and defining others, through the use of colour and sometimes by taking the theme of contradiction and opposition into the realm of fantasy, by means of abstraction and by adding unexpected images and colours. It is important for her to create work which engages the emotions and to add a further layer of emphasis she often creates a sense of the weather, season or time of day to achieve this.

Part of her technique in the process of creating her work involves starting a painting with a ground of brightly coloured, sometimes fluorescent acrylic paint which she then works over using oils in relatively thin layers which allowing some of the under-painting to show through and remain strongly visible in selected places. Her use of rags to wipe off and re-apply the paint until the desired effect is achieved adds a further organic and natural feel to the final finish.

Josie’s use of fluorescent paint was inspired by the notion of using colours or other elements that are far removed from nature to strengthen the contrasts which are evident in the imagery which is also why she uses abstract patterns in the same way. To the viewer what they see in the final work is imagery that appears from the background as if sections of the painting were lost in another world.

Recent work included in the exhibition includes the Scrap Yard’ series which comprises a number of small-scale paintings of scenes taken from scrap yards, using water based oils on board. This medium lends itself well to the work, which continues to combine realism with abstraction, but uses a more considered method of painting.