Behind The Scenes with Jasmine Megson
Most of my work at the moment is being completed at this desk in my garage at home. Although it can get a little too much sometimes, I try to find ways to keep myself productive while I'm in this space. One of the main ways I have been doing that is to have background noise so I don't feel like I'm alone, but I don't have distractions. Lately my background noises have come from music I've been enjoying, Sims 4 building videos on YouTube, and TV shows I can listen to/watch on repeat (mainly Friends, Community, and The Office). After a couple minutes of these things being on in the background, my head starts to focus on what's in front of me instead of the white noise.
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Because I have been at home, something I have to pull me back into reality when I've sunk myself too deep is the sound of my four cats either playing with each other or running amuck somewhere upstairs. There's nothing like the sound of a cat knocking over a hallway table to make you realise you need a break.
One day one of these said cats jumped onto a shelf full of plants and ceramics belonging to my housemate, breaking a bunch of the ceramics on his venture towards better lighting for his nap. When seeing how devastated my housemate was when the plate broke, I decided to turn the pieces into an artwork, which (I think you know where this is going) is where Golden started.
In all honesty, it took me a fair while to work out exactly what I wanted to do with the pieces in order to properly commemorate it. As you can see, the plate already had a beautiful antique pattern already on it, fortunately preserved in 'the incident'. I had already been looking into ideas surrounding memory and stumbled upon a bunch of artists that were making artworks by moulding or replicating objects as a way of exploring memory. This idea struck me, starting a fire of creativity in me, so I went with it.
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The first step in the painting process began with me painting directly onto the pattern to recreate it in paint. Thanks to the seemingly never-ending drying process of oil paint, I was able to take my time with the paint in order to create movement. What has been created with this work is something I hope brings a little bit of joy to my housemate.
For a while I've been thinking about trying to recreate my childhood memories in paintings, so when I started thinking about memory as a concept for my works in this exhibition, I thought, "No time like the present to recreate the past!" I have been experimenting with alternative canvases for a while now and had some second-hand Roald Dahl books which I felt were fitting to use for Recollection as I used to read them when I was a kid.
There are three memories depicted in this work. The first is from when I was probably around ten and my mum would take us swimming at some kind of lake that had a tire swing tied to one of the trees over the water. The second is from stories I have been told about my brother and I waking up in the middle of the night to play with our toys in the light of the fridge. The final painting is the least recognisable memory of mine that I only know of because I have a photo, where I am sitting in a little playground car with my dad and baby brother when I was a toddler.
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Although each of the paintings depicts a different image, they all started the same way. My first step with these paintings was to put down as many solid colours and shapes from each memory I could remember. After I thought I was finished with this step, I went in with a small brush to spread the paint around to distort the colours to turn them into more of what I saw in my mind. I took an additional step on the first and third paintings, leaving the middle one in its current state. On the first painting, I made pressings on cartridge paper that I then repressed onto the painting, whereas on the second I committed and pressed the whole book closed. In creating this work, I have been able to explore the limits of my own memory.
