I am pleased to announce that I have some work going down to a show called Home down in Birmingham, open July 21st -August 3rd These are works out of my new series. I am the M

No More Nostalgia: No More Nostalgia: This is another building from Marin County, however in this case its context rests in connection to a grandiose mythological narrative about patriarchal religion handing over the baton to feminine spirituality. The characters to the left are appropriated out of a Giotto painting, and the feet are those of actress Blake Lively--Hollywood stars as our modern goddesses. This painting took on a life of its own as its meaning during the process of making, but I see the connection between the personal and the universal, and the individual life as an embodiment of universal themes.

The Bank: This piece depicts a bank in Marin county California--on the north of San Francisco Bay. Having spent my childhood here, I returned in 2014 to the area to live for a while. I was struck by how certain buildings triggered memory and nostalgia, and something about this 1960's era building made me recall running around as a wild teenager, waiting outside convenient stores to ask someone to buy fags, or meeting friends just to hang about. I took a snap off my iPhone but also used google street view screenshots to make an amalgam image reference. This means the painting is largely informed by the textures and qualities of the images I worked from. I glazed the painting and sanded and scraped it multiple times to give it a worn down, distressed look, somehow to show the tiredness of old memories that do not serve a purpose to your life in the present.

Looking Up: This piece is about longing for home. But she is on the outside looking in. Home and family represent both belonging and a fetishistic middle class consumerism and idealization of the family unit. The house looms, asserting itself as a symbol success behind a property line fence. The woman disappears into her role as mother--and they are but cartoons of real life. Of course much of this is based on my contradictory feelings of being home raising children and understanding my own desires for home, and a sense of normalcy. I express this sentiment in art, but in real life am living it. I think the main point of this painting is contradiction.

press release

The Old Print Works is proud to announce It’s first open-submission exhibition, HOME.

Featuring the work of fifteen, emerging contemporary artists.

While each practitioner retains the integrity of their vision, the work is linked through a

common thread, exploring the meaning of ‘home’.

Exhibiting a selection of painting’s from her series ‘The Connectivist’s Dilemma’, Jessica

Kirkpatrick explores the notion of home from both the real and the conceptual. Her ‘mashups’

of stereotypical suburban America and the Scottish landscape study the experience of

fragmentation during migration and the act of reconciling and assimilating oneself.

Through her work, Jessica explores the utopian desire for connection, community and

middle-class consumerism.

Whilst Matthew Humphreys, a filmmaker, photographer and the hearing child to two

profoundly deaf parents, draws on languages and communication embedded in social

relationships within his work, creating an installation based on his parent's living room, he

reconnects with his childhood experience.

Along with Sylvia Chan, who returned to her hometown in Hong Kong and captured the

juxtaposition of the cultures bustling, over-crowded streets and ingrained loneliness.

HOME investigates meaning through differing mediums, interpretations and ideologies.

Opening on the 21st July at 12 am in The Old Print Works, Upper Gallery, benefitting from

the factories classic, industrial architecture and vast, undisturbed natural light.

Surrounded by creative organisations, projects and in conjunction with ORT

Galleries ‘Schwarmerei Members Show’. Free entry and drinks.

For more information on selected artists featured, please visit the Old Print Works blog.

I feel the urge to run. I am in a stand off with these tired pictures--colors need tweaking, elements added or taken away, areas masked off or sanded. Avoidance. Eating, emailing, caffeinating--knowing i need to stand, put on my painting jeans, pick up a brush and work. But that threshold of discomfort must be traversed. I get it-- this unease, the not knowing whats next makes the creative process interesting, the pulse of fear and excitement to compel a life's work. I start tentatively with a few misfires, color too dark, too saturated--I sift through a tray of pulverized discolored tubes for a selection of paints to mix and mix and mix. A little Mars black to desaturate, some indigo to cool, and some Napthol to punch it up. The pigments dance at their molecular levels to speak my color poetry. In the past, I strove for a dark neutral palette, and then there was the phase of beiges and creams, right now I am into my pastels and pinks. My current interest in pink is probably some childhood regression, (recovering my inner princess--its pure cliched beauty a balm to middle age disillusionment). I love oil paint's heavy inkiness, like clay from the earth; like minerals and insect blood and flower tincture smeared across fabric. As I begin to make panicky strokes, regret them, rub them out, try again, thats better, I feel my hips loosen, my breathing take pace. I am getting into it--finally-- and I have a few hours before its time to pick up baby (whoops don't mention babies--this is the professional realm here!) I would love to say this is where the fun starts, but its more of a frantic, semi-possessed frenzy, of dripping, splattering, scrubbing and blurring. Then the pause: Like? Not like? Am I ok in my not liking it? Is there something interesting happening, or is it just...crap? The deeply humble place of non-judgement where you don't know if your a fucking badass, or just another person who went to art college ages ago.