JENNY WATSON

In this exhibition we see Watson’s signature large-scale paintings on Belgian linen. Each, features a solitary figure and a high key palette, made using an assortment of haberdashery diamantes and cardboard cut-outs providing a counter to exquisite Japanese pigments, acrylic and rabbit skin glue.

Watson describes the three paintings as taking place in ‘non-specific spaces’ or fantasy worlds. Girl in a blindfold, is, as the name suggests, a child in a blindfold.Sleeping beauty, is a girl asleep on a fantasy bed, and Solar Treasure, a girl depicted from behind staring out at the universe. The expanse of green we see inGirl in a blindfold, suggests the countryside but beyond that we cannot be sure what is going on. Sleeping beauty is a pink fantasy interior of a sleeping chamber; it could be from a fairy-tale inside a castle with its ornate hot pink wallpaper and adorned bed linen. Likewise Solar Treasure with its dark purple sky, the stars, planets and moon invites the viewer to question the infinite expanse of the cosmos or as Watson calls it, “the whole other thing out there”.

Like Freud and Jung, Watson believes the child exists in all of us. For a long time her work has contained elements of this idea. It is evident in the unpretentious manner with which she paints and is reflected in her childlike, almost innocent palette and unmediated mark. Watson seems to look at the world through the eyes of a child, albeit a knowing or precocious child, and perhaps this is the quality we, as viewers, identify with because somehow her works make you feel you can smell the rain and feel the wind.

- Kate Alstergren