Jessie Brennan is a professional artist
who exhibits nationally and internationally. Her practice primarily employs
drawing, painting and printmaking. She graduated from the Royal College of
Art with MA Printmaking in 2007 and has won several awards including the
Augustus Martin Prize and MAN Group Drawing Prize. She is currently a
tutor in Drawing at Thames Valley University, and runs a number
of drawing workshops at London galleries including Camden Arts
Centre, Pump House Gallery and Bishopsgate Institute.
In 2008, Jessie was funded to continue
professional development enrolling on the Postgraduate Certificate in
Learning and Teaching at CLTAD. Brook Gallery welcomed her in February 2009 for
her first solo exhibition at the gallery. In Spring 2009, Jessie also worked
with Art on the Underground whereby she produce work with communities at
Southwark station, London.
Jessie’s practice is storytelling
without endings. Using drawing (including printmaking and painting)
she constructs open narratives made from sources as diverse as memory,
imagination, collaged photocopies and drawings, found photographs, internet
imagery, life and the people she knows. The work exists, like the
snap shot, as an intimate vision of a partly made-up partly remembered
scenario.
Drawing is fundamental to Jessie: it is
about ways of looking and understanding. Printmaking, an extension
of drawing, is a vehicle for the unexpected and within each stage of the print
process a discovery is made. There is honesty and vulnerability in
drawing but also a raw and graphic quality that resonates with her
subjects: an intimate crowd at a burial, young girls in confirmation
dresses, boys in uniform, or a child bathing. Within each image an
intimate encounter awaits us and there is the proposition that we
re-look. Human relationships, female sexuality, reality, fantasy,
memory, loss and mortality are recurring themes within the
work. Here, in the picking and mixing of drawn assemblages, is an
attempt to (re)present ambiguity: to propose the familiar and knowing only
for that process to become undone. And in so doing all things shifting are
uncovered, the uncertain exposed.