Jemima Moore in her London Studio by Blue Shop Gallery
Jemima Moore, Copper Sulphate, 2024, Oil Stick on Panel, 90cm x 120cm
Jemima Moore, Tender Hearts, 2024, Oil Stick on Panel, 90cm x 120cm
COLLECTOR’S BRUNCH
Saturday Brunch with Jemima Moore at Blue Shop Gallery | Collectors, artists and everyone is welcome
Saturday 15th February | 11.30am-12.30pm
RSVP hello@blueshopcottage.com
SXSE LIVE MUSIC NIGHT
We once again welcome you to a night of beautifully crafted music by wonderfully talented artists, John Johanna and Tenderness, at Blue Shop Gallery on Thursday 27th February. Doors 7pm.
BOOK TICKETS | £15
Blue Shop Gallery presents
Jemima Moore
'Slipstream'
6th - 23rd February 2025
72 Brixton Road, Oval SW9 6BH
Gallery opening hours: Wed - Sun | 11am - 6pm
Jemima Moore (b.1992, Sharjah, UAE) lives and works in London. She studied History of Art at The University of Cambridge (2011-2014), Fine Art Diploma at West Dean (2021-2022) and completed a Masters in Painting at the Royal College of Art (2023-24).
She has been nominated for the Contemporary British Painting Prize (2024) and has undertaken a residency with Megafield Gallery in Beijing, China (2025). Recent selected group shows include: Taste, OHSH Projects (Los Angeles, 2024), South Open 2, OHSH Projects (London 2024), Caper, Greatorex Street (London 2024), All This Wrath, Blue Shop Gallery (London 2024) and Works on Paper 5 and 6, Blue Shop Gallery (London 2023), Any Day Now, Copeland Gallery (2022 London). Her work is held in private collections in China, Scandinavia, United States and the UK.
Jemima Moore paints to exist within a space that is in equal measure analytic and intuitive. The results are paintings which can be understood as maps; maps to spaces that exist somewhere between reality and subconscious.
Moore imagines throwing an image into a pond: a memory of a fabric, a velvet brocade in a Titian, a patch of reflected sky in a lake. The artist uses oil stick to draw the image in mind, tracing the forms onto panel. The forms dissolve as the image falls deeper into the pond. The layers of marks submerge and compress as she adds more, then scrubs them back into the picture plane and the surface of the timber. The water of the pond becomes the subconscious. From this murky place Moore uses the visual language of discrete data: dots, lines and rhythm to chart a new course. There are still particles of the original image but now they are refracted through the body of water, disrupted by the bubbles and scum of the painted surface.
The original image is lost, but the painting becomes a new thing in and of itself. A map which reterritorializes a place in the subconscious.
Slipstream
Phosphorescent light bubbling up from a cobalt lake, luminous yellow forms in a field of cadmium, a mossy riverbed draped in matte red paint. Each painting in this body of work hovers between the imagined and the material. It builds on the artist’s interest in the metaphor of the painted surface as a reflective pond, however, in these works the water is not still and deep: it moves. The works hold a delicate memory in a hazy suspension of dots, ready to be swept away by the wind or water in an instant.
The exhibition takes its name from the title of Elizabeth Jane Howard’s memoir. She tells the story of her life as a breathless stream of events in which she floats along in the slipstream of greater forces. The title resonated with the artist as it reflected both the method of making and the content of the works which are a filtered response to the plethora of images coursing through the artist’s mind.
Rhythm and intuition drives the paintings as the artist continuously responds to the last mark laid. In a process of deferral, layers of pigment and areas of colour are built up only to be dragged back over each other with sandpaper. Glazes make ripples out of the muddied paint, echoing the ripples of the wood grain beneath. The final image emerges in the difference between the murky background and the intense saturation of the foreground, the dabs of coloured highlights indicating light that will immediately shift.
It is the slipstream of visual information that the artist draws on to make the paintings: they are a response to the contemporary context of the work, the history of painting and memories of fabric, patterns and landscapes. The yellow dots on “Chilli Oil” are the glints of light on a Velazquez or Titian whilst the cadmium red against the duller mauve recall the monotone richness of a flocked damask fabric. The luminous yellow of ”Gatorade” is the toxic sky of Derek Jarman’s film “Road to Avebury”. The intense blues and floral motif of “Copper Sulphate” are as much from Monet’s Waterlilies as they are from Designer’s Guild fabric patterns of the Noughties. Whilst the ever shifting pinks and reds of “Tender” are similarly drawn as much from the work of Bonnard and Vuillard as from samples of liberty print fabric and memories of wooded landscapes at dusk. There is no one source more valuable or necessary and as the paintings are made each appears and shifts with the layers of paint just as memories appear and are replaced with new ones.
These paintings are open, investigative and tender, they offer no conclusions or concreteness, but are a fragment of remembered time, that will, unless it’s painted, be swept away.
hello@blueshopcottage.com for catalogue requests