A Fragile State - Jayne Anita Smith

About

Jayne Anita Smith is an abstract figurative artist whose paintings are born from automatic drawings produced on an intimate scale in oil paint. Smith uses these first, primitive marks, as a pathway to connect to the subconscious, to her internal voices. From these first raw brushstrokes, the tentative figurative forms start to emerge and claim their presence.

Her drawings and paintings explore the fallibility of the human condition. Promised the sublime through a manufactured, false beauty, flawed individuals search for an otherness in relation to the self. Seeking the promised land they are engulfed into a labyrinth of fractured congestion; blinded by toxic temptations and dark desires. Suspended by the threads of their past failures and repressed memories, they cast the shadows of their own destruction.

These paintings are from an ongoing series of works, Monuments and Echoes, made in response to both personal and collective loss over the past couple of years. Despite the global pandemic, global warming and imminent threat of war, we are intent on getting everything 'back to normal', although seeming still to be set on a path of self destruction. 

Smith's processes are informed by an investigation into the conflict between the spiritual and physical, in a society where the contemporary focus is very much on materiality and where the eternal pursuit of the sublime is often lost