About

Emily Jackson builds paintings from patterned units, re-worked, reshaped and redistributed: edge to edge, in colours she never consciously chooses. Each palette is taken from previously found printed matter: a box of crayons, a fruit label, a paper bag, the moquette of a London Underground seat. Going back to early childhood, she calls this process ‘partying’. Printed ephemera and its potential is never discounted: flattened into books, noted down, pinned to the wall.

The compositions, drenched in complex patterns, refuse specific hierarchy. Elements keep their own colour and edge, and morph, react and dance with one another. Background and foreground are not distinguished, and no shape is allowed to govern the whole field.

The method began when she was nine, in a bedroom she covered in handprints of primary poster paint. For years afterwards, the handprints kept surfacing through each new coat of emulsion.

The practice draws on the British domestic and commercial pattern culture of the 1980s and 1990s, informed deeply from childhood experiences: dressmaking patterns, Liberty and Laura Ashley prints, patchwork, greetings-card packaging. It also draws on annual visits to La Borne as a youngster: the stoneware potters’ village in rural France, where decoration, function and skill are one practice rather than three. From Shirley Jaffe it takes non-hierarchical composition; from Helen Frankenthaler, the stained surface; from the American Pattern and Decoration painters of the 1970s, the argument that decoration is a serious subject for painting.

The work moves between canvas, textile, wallpaper and generative code without ranking them. It includes a fabric and wallpaper collection for Maison Pierre Frey, an algorithmic project with Motus released on Art Blocks, and a thirty-part commission acquired by the Deji Art Museum, Nanjing.

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