Antonia Jackson
London
London based oil painter who creates colourful, ambiguous and dreamlike semi-figurative paintings out of found or personal archives.
Interested in memory and the cinematic, I find inspiration in images drawn from 1960s New Wave French and Italian art films (a form of collective archive), super 8 reels from personal archives, and found or personal photographs. Such mediated images provide a space for the recovery of memories through the medium of painting.
The submitted body of work stems from recently rediscovered Super 8 reels that my father shot around the world during his business travels in the 70s and 80s. They epitomise a world on the brink of globalisation. Carefully selected stills from those reels are appropriated and redefined during the painting process, which allows a distant past to be brought back into the present and new narratives to emerge. They are often painted on the same format to replicate the sequencing of film and due to the very nature of their degraded source, they hover between abstraction and figuration: at times the brushwork is more defined and at others more loose and free. Painted on board with thin layers of paint often laid over a carefully chosen ground, they aim to reflect the fragility and transience of memory. My use of colour, influenced by post-impressionism (and in particular Bonnard, Vuillard, Vallotton and Matisse), is an essential tool to create dreamlike surreal spaces of memory, half remembered, half imagined.
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