Degree: Fine Art - Painting and Printmaking,
University: Glasgow School of Art
Graduation Year: 2016
Jade Sturrock is a Glasgow based artist specialising in painting and printmaking. Her current work revolves around the cultural construction of the female body and identity. By creating bold, multi – layered works she questions the kinds of idealistic images of women seen in advertising, whilst favouring the body’s sensual and biological elements. Through a use of abstraction, the figures seem to morph into one another and the boundaries between internal and external are blurred. Rather than seeing the body as a singular, restrictive means by which to define beauty, Jade treats it as an ever developing entity and suggests that there can be beauty found in imperfection. Her use of vibrant and emotive colour brings the body into a more positive realm of depiction and makes parallels with the natural, organic world.
Through a use of technical and expressive methods, my practice deals with the cultural construction of the body. By combining print making techniques with intuitive mark-making, I aim to re-configure ways in which the female form can be consumed viscerally. Incorporating found imagery with projective painting and drawing methods allows me to renegotiate the body’s sense of subjectivity. This often results in multi-layered, mixed media works which contain depictions of ambiguous bodily forms. I deconstruct the fixed image to reveal the body’s sensual and multifarious nature which acts as a means of re-coding the visual conditions typically regulative of the body; the aim being to place it within a more positive realm of depiction. Highlighted is the paradox between culture’s ideological impositions and natural bodily instinct and impulse. By developing forms which do not follow logical criteria, but are based on subjective associations, I incite the viewer to become incorporated in the language of the reconstructed imagery. Implementing a fluid, direct and emotive form of painterly communication allows me to favour the body’s uncontrollable, biological elements over the paradigms which seek to streamline it.
(2019) Miscellaneous, Six Foot Gallery, Glasgow
(2019) Inspired by the Glasgow Girls, Mackintosh Queen's Cross, Glasgow
(2018) 2019 Showcase, Six Foot Gallery, Glasgow
(2017) Women's Work: Being Seen (Part 2), Gallery 3, The Lillie Art Gallery, Milngavie
(2017) Women's Work: Being Seen (Part 1), The Lillie Art Gallery, Milngavie
(2017) Emerging Contemporaries from Glasgow School of Art, The Glasgow Art Club, Glasgow
(2016) Emerging Artists: New Talent, The Gallery, Dunblane
(2016) The Glasgow School of Art Degree Show, Tontine Building, GSA Campus, Glasgow
(2016) Painters Gonna Paint, Tontine Building, GSA Campus, Glasgow
(2015) Safe and Healthy, McLellan Galleries/Grace and Fyfe Clarke Gallery,, Glasgow
(2015) Finest Works, Tontine Building, GSA Campus, Glasgow
(2014) 200%, Reid Building, GSA Campus, Glasgow