Grad X

Jessie Aylmer

Jessie Aylmer is a visual artist working primarily in photographic and drawing methods. Her work is concerned with the relationship between nature and architecture. Her work explores the difference between how types of spaces, archival and personal such as the Botanic Gardens and her bedroom, are perceived and artistically considered.

Emulsioned Botanics (fairy dust V1700Y)

Emulsioned Botanics (fairy dust V1700Y) explores three spaces, her bedroom, her back garden, and the Botanic Gardens. Taking photos of these 3 spaces using a variety of photographic methods, Polaroid, digital, analogue, and slides, she draws architectural plans from one space, onto another. 

An A1 Inkjet print, originally from a polaroid, with the architectural plans for the Fern house in the Botanical Garden drawn on, is placed on the floor, next to an old bathroom tile with a collection of artefacts from her garden, as well as the original polaroid. Through this collection of things, she makes different photographic prints of different values explicit to each other. 

Alternative photographic processes are used to articulate decorative architecture specifically, the shade of pink, the colour that adorns her bedroom walls, and to document the architecture of light within the spaces. The lumen prints ‘This was made on my windowsill’ capture lunar and solar movements throughout her bedroom, with dusty pinks and lavenders regressing next to yellow shapes. Also exposed onto them is a list of pink colour names, from ‘Angel Kiss’ to ‘Valentine’s Memories’, creating a script for some of the pinks used to draw measurements. 

The Grid, a structure that can bridge the two realms of the unconscious and scientific is used in 35mm slide projections. The slides are double-exposed images of her house and its surrounding exteriors. Silver tape applied to the slides in a grid formation crops parts of the images demonstrating the Grid's mythic ability to provide a sense of materialism, science, or logic while also allowing us to escape into belief and illusion. 

Reflecting on Dawn Ades's exploration of linear elements and structural patterns, her practice is concerned with creating spatial articulation images of different resolutions and print qualities. She explores the embodied presence of concrete measurements being redescribed onto personal photographs creating intimate blueprints.