Alison on her work:
I explore the idea of wilderness, both in a physical and metaphorical sense. As we increasingly dwell in urban environments, I want to spotlight the importance of retaining a place for wilderness in our psyche, as well as in our natural, endangered world, cities and suburbs.
My work engages with the idea that psychological wilderness and freedom is essential to living a fulfilling urban life, and I hope it will remind people to value the physical kind.
A core part of my artistic process is my own ongoing experience of and relationship with nature, and the narrative and emotional connotations it has held for me during my own life. I take photographs and create sketches, from which I create “digitally” distorted and filtered images, as my preparation for painting.
These preparations act as a guide as I paint, and also help me to revisit that experience and the emotions I wish to convey. I choose the medium of paint because I feel a visceral connection to the wilderness of artists throughout the ages, back to the earliest cave paintings and earth pigments smeared on skin. I view my works as visually poetic and symbolic, and in them I layer many ideas of the human experience of life and death, and consciousness, as expressed by the metaphoric and scientific concept of ‘light’.
I want to offer the viewer not only a journey into our inner, psychological wilderness, but a connection to the wider beauty and mysteries of our world.
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Alison Jardine
Linear Mode
