Ocean of Her
18 - 24 April 2026
St Margaret's House, 3rd Floor Gallery - 151 London Road, Edinburgh
10am - 2pm daily or other times by appointment
Launch Event:
Saturday 18th April,
6-7pm Participatory guided experience (Free but must register: https://bit.ly/3PFac3o )
7-8pm reception (Free & open to the public)
OCEAN OF HER. APRIL 18TH-25TH
OCEAN OF HER. APRIL 18TH-25TH
Let’s create something meaningful together.
Ocean of Her is the newest body of work by artist and art psychotherapist Jessica Kirkpatrick. Supported by the RSA Blackadder Travel Award, this work in part responds to an immersive journey to Teotihuacan, Mexico, where she engaged in sacred site work and Toltec practices. This exhibition marks a threshold moment in Kirkpatrick’s practice—where her identities as artist, healer, and facilitator converge.
The paintings and drawings reflect a shift in her approach to art-making: embracing the kinaesthetic, haptic, and psychic dimensions of the canvas. Rather than pursuing aesthetic perfection or technical mastery, Kirkpatrick works through process, presence, and emotional truth. Each brush mark becomes an act of devotion—a tactile anchor into attentive awareness. The canvas functions not only as a surface for images but as a psychic frame in which sensation, memory, and intuition can unfold.
Ocean of Her—is the vast, generative force of feminine creativity. This ocean holds the full spectrum of experience: joy, rage, grief, sensuality, tenderness, and ecstasy. Historically, such emotional and intuitive intelligence has often been suppressed or dismissed. Through painting, Kirkpatrick reclaims these energies, allowing them to flow freely in raw, expressive forms. Imperfection is welcomed as the gold of humanity, creating space for complexity and authenticity.
Kirkpatrick is expanding her practice to offer therapeutic and creative services that use art-making as a pathway toward healing, self-understanding, and community connection. The participatory relational experience accompanying the exhibition offers a glimpse into this approach—inviting visitors to understanding art not simply as something to observe, but as a living process that can support expression, reflection, and transformation.
In a world increasingly fractured by conflict, oppression, ecological grief and collective trauma, Kirkpatrick’s work seeks to cultivate tenderness, care, and authenticity. Drawing on ancestral wisdom, ritual, and embodied creative practice, Ocean of Her invites viewers to pause, feel, and reconnect with the vast tidal intelligence of the creative psyche.
Ultimately, the exhibition is both a personal offering and a communal invitation: to witness, to participate, and to remember the deep currents of imagination, intuition, and emotional life that flow within us all.
OCEAN OF HER EXHIBITION IS AT SNT MARGARET’S HOUSE 151 LONDON RD. EH7 6AE. THIRD FLOOR GALLERIES
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OCEAN OF HER EXHIBITION IS AT SNT MARGARET’S HOUSE 151 LONDON RD. EH7 6AE. THIRD FLOOR GALLERIES *
GO to my instagram @Jessica_kirkpatrick_art
Becoming Incomplete
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.
Have you ever had a creative block and what did you do to get over it? How did you get your work back on track when you saw it going awry? How do you cope when you were at the studio and werent sure what to do?
Let’s create something meaningful together.
Ocean of Her is the newest body of work by artist and art psychotherapist Jessica Kirkpatrick. Supported by the RSA Blackadder Travel Award, this work in part responds to an immersive journey to Teotihuacan, Mexico, where she engaged in sacred site work and Toltec practices. This exhibition marks a threshold moment in Kirkpatrick’s practice—where her identities as artist, healer, and facilitator converge.
The paintings and drawings reflect a shift in her approach to art-making: embracing the kinaesthetic, haptic, and psychic dimensions of the canvas. Rather than pursuing aesthetic perfection or technical mastery, Kirkpatrick works through process, presence, and emotional truth. Each brush mark becomes an act of devotion—a tactile anchor into attentive awareness. The canvas functions not only as a surface for images but as a psychic frame in which sensation, memory, and intuition can unfold.
Ocean of Her—is the vast, generative force of feminine creativity. This ocean holds the full spectrum of experience: joy, rage, grief, sensuality, tenderness, and ecstasy. Historically, such emotional and intuitive intelligence has often been suppressed or dismissed. Through painting, Kirkpatrick reclaims these energies, allowing them to flow freely in raw, expressive forms. Imperfection is welcomed as the gold of humanity, creating space for complexity and authenticity.
Kirkpatrick is expanding her practice to offer therapeutic and creative services that use art-making as a pathway toward healing, self-understanding, and community connection. The participatory relational experience accompanying the exhibition offers a glimpse into this approach—inviting visitors to understanding art not simply as something to observe, but as a living process that can support expression, reflection, and transformation.
In a world increasingly fractured by conflict, oppression, ecological grief and collective trauma, Kirkpatrick’s work seeks to cultivate tenderness, care, and authenticity. Drawing on ancestral wisdom, ritual, and embodied creative practice, Ocean of Her invites viewers to pause, feel, and reconnect with the vast tidal intelligence of the creative psyche.
Ultimately, the exhibition is both a personal offering and a communal invitation: to witness, to participate, and to remember the deep currents of imagination, intuition, and emotional life that flow within us all.
