Jessie Makinson (b. 1985) lives and works in London. Makinson graduated from Turps Banana Studio Program (2014-16), The Royal Drawing School, Post Graduate Course (2011- 2013) and Edinburgh College of Art, Drawing and Painting, BA, (2004-2007).

Makinson’s practice spans painting, drawing, printmaking and ceramics. Makinson actively welcomes a sense of hybridity and historical reflexivity, with her work finding its touch stones in art history, literature, pop culture and speculative fiction. Replete with extended metaphors and veiled meanings, her depictions of figures in luscious landscapes or richly furnished interior settings are intentionally ambiguous - they are at once playful, mischievous, suggestive and threatening. Her most recent works present a cast of anthropomorphic figures inhabiting a bucolic landscape, densely populated with trees and animals. Executed in a warm, glowing Rococo pallet, the initial sense of pastoral romance is undermined by a growing sense of tension and foreboding – all is not well in Arcadia. The figures are capricious, uncompromising and insolent. They stare straight back at us or ignore us entirely as they stalk their habitat. At the centre of Makinson’s artistic output is drawing which she uses as a vehicle to free her imagination and make thought physical. A form of automatic drawing underpins all of her compositions from which she then teases out the armature of a painting. Her painting emerge’s intuitively and in the moment, with Makinson constantly referring back to a library of drawings and other reference material. As the picture develops, so does the narrative; it’s references and atmosphere growing as she works.

Recent exhibitions include: 'Breaking Shells, Koppel Projects, Baker Street (2018); 'If you can't stand the heat', Roaming Projects (2018); 'Poem of the pillow', curated by Kate Neave, London (2017); 'Figure it out', Tannery project space, London (2017); 'You see me like a UFO', Marcelle Joseph Projects, Ascot (2017). 

selected works