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“My paintings are like minds that think, but not in words”
Faces, torsos, hands, and feet emerge, as if through impressionistic mist, their features dissolving back into the layered, translucent mesh of fragmented and abstracted paint gestures. There’s a wide range of painting techniques, layered over each other, creating a complex visual field, one that attends to the apparent random nature of thought itself.
I’m interested in how paintings can not only be made by people, but be like people — How an image can be ultimately unknowable, have the psychological depth, contradiction, the beauty and perhaps the misdirection of the human subject that created it. With such a view I’m staking a claim for art as an extension of ourselves — one that truly extends our consciousness into further territory, and extends our conceptual and dialogical capacities.
To this end it can be said that my work is about selfhood, and in particular, the fragility of selfhood and authorship. Sometimes these themes are explicitly present, whilst at other times they quietly permeate the image, creating an atmosphere of uncertainty. In early collaborative projects (Jackson Webb 2003 - 2010), I explored how two artists can generate a “third mind” — a shared, uncontrollable author. Since then, my investigations into authorship have continued through painting, where I often defer to material and image experimentation to introduce a sense of otherness. These strategies are influenced by Surrealist methods, allowing space for the unforeseeable to guide the process. During their making, my paintings become a space for capturing the shifting nature of subjectivity. Rather than projecting a singular, fixed vision, I view my work almost like a net that entangles a fluid, evolving self over an extended period of time.
In the work, a fracturing or unfixed self is often manifest through representational elements embedded within more abstract fields of mark-making. The studio acts as a vast repository in which colour swatches, sketches, fabrics, reflective materials, offcuts from discarded paintings, dust and detritus circulate around my canvases. Sometimes I’ll pin these objects to paintings to create a surprise (for myself). Sometimes they become part of the work, and at other times they are copied quite faithfully in oil paint, often to then be worked over again.
The question of selfhood feels particularly pertinent in today's climate, where individualism is simultaneously exalted as an ideal and undermined by contradictory forces, reducing individuals to consumers, turning personal identity into something transactional. The self is both idealised and fractured. Ultimately, my works explore the precariousness of selfhood in relation to technology, the environment, and philosophical ideas.
And then for all of that, a mind has traits… so paintings do too. And these traits people sometimes call subject matter.
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Bio
Mark Jackson is an artist based in London, England. His work considers themes of subjectivity and authorship, exploring how these concepts intersect with shifts in the technological, philosophical and cultural landscape. Recent solo exhibitions include ‘psychic surface’ at Castor Gallery (2024) and ‘turtles all the way down’ at OHSH Projects (2023). In 2024, Jackson was featured in group exhibitions across New York, Los Angeles, Leipzig, London, and Burgundy. In addition to his artistic practice, Jackson teaches and writes. His recent writing projects include an interview with Richard Aldrich (2024) and an article on Rita Ackermann (2021), both for Turps Magazine.