| Since achieving a master’s degree in fine art from Chelsea College of Art in London in 1995, Jemima Brown has established a career as an artist practicing in a variety of media, including drawing, sculpture, and moving image. Her work has been exhibited internationally, and is held in numerous private and public collections. Past awards have included a Fulbright Scholarship (as a guest of the Graduate Program at University of California Los Angeles), and in 2006 she held the post of Cocheme Fellowship from the University of the Arts in London, where she was a resident artist at Central Saint Martins Byam Shaw School of Art. | 
|
Laurie Stephenson
Jemima Brown, Purry Furry, 2001. Plastics, clothing, fabric. Courtesy of the artist.
Since achieving a master’s degree in fine art from Chelsea College of Art in London in 1995, Jemima Brown has established a career as an artist practicing in a variety of media, including drawing, sculpture, and moving image. Her work has been exhibited internationally, and is held in numerous private and public collections. Past awards have included a Fulbright Scholarship (as a guest of the Graduate Program at University of California Los Angeles), and in 2006 she held the post of Cocheme Fellowship from the University of the Arts in London, where she was a resident artist at Central Saint Martins Byam Shaw School of Art.
Over the past four years Brown’s practice has spliced together a genre-hopping diversity of mythology, literary, and cinematic references from Blade Runner to Beatrix Potter, and family and political histories, to create characters from a personal universe who are at once peculiar yet familiar.
Scott Fitzgerald heroines are reimagined for the 1990s Club Kid scene, and her paternal grandparents experience of being blacklisted by McCarthy in the 1950s is fused with more recent political events. References to music and song lyrics in the titles of the work (to Dory Previn in Give Me Your Blacklisted, or to the Velvet Underground in All Tomorrows Afterparties) may also spark remembered soundtracks inside the viewer’s head to accompany the objects and images themselves.
The work is conceptually and formally collaged—made from cut-and-paste elements—to create a world of fictional and semi-fictional characters who are both constructed as sculptures and represented in detailed drawings that are made into screen printed wallpapers. Works of digitally manipulated and time-lapsed moving image feature sculptural objects and characters, and the drawings have been animated into kaleidoscopic sound reactive projections.
The sculptures are assembled from life masks taken of multiple subjects (the artist, family members, students, and colleagues) whose features are juggled and recombined to create new “people.” Cast in wax or plastics, the figures are dressed or draped in carefully selected clothing and fabrics, and augmented with other ready-made objects, such as the highly decorative synthetic flowers used in recent works. Although often shown as single figures, these characters are typically developed in the studio as members of family groups.
