Biography

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 since won several awards including the Augustus Martin Prize. She is currently 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. Jessie was funded to continue professional development at CLTAD where she will complete the Postgraduate Certificate in Learning and Teaching in late 2009. Jessie recently exhibited her first solo exhibition Black Light at Brook Gallery.  She is currently working on a commission by Art on the Underground for which she will produce artwork with communities at Southwark station in London.

Jessie’s practice references storytelling without narrative resolution. Using drawing (including printmaking and painting) she constructs scenarios 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; portraits of young girls, strangely mature. Within each image an intimate encounter awaits us, and something uncomfortable stirs. There is always 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 only for that process to become undone.