Jamie Frost

Jamie Frost is a fine artist who makes sculptures and drawings. His work seeks to reframe figuration and the classical tradition. His career to date has been diverse, from award-winning portrait sculptor to staging a touring exhibition of large scale drawings and sculpture. Jamie’s current work explores themes of contact and intimacy. The heavily expressive painted works reveal an interest in the gaps between us, both imposed and elective.

Working with live models, he may take inspiration from renaissance sculpture, cinema stills, Butoh theatre, or a gesture made in his company.  Jamie patiently considers the pose, composition and gesture of his works in lengthy experimentation. A layered process of sketches, prints, maquettes, photographs, and drawings contribute to the production of major pieces of sculpture or installations of drawings.

This mark-making holds the same expressive vocabulary as the sculpture: a stuttering fragmented gesture echoes the mixed fortunes of a broken branch; a flowing lyrical line holding tension like a carved surface. In some senses these are working drawings, a place to explore the interactions of figures and to develop a language of concealment and revealing before launching into sculptural work.

‘The words we use with trees: limb; heartwood; trunk, are the language of bodies. The smell, warmth, weight, moisture, the sounds, are analogous with human flesh. They are heady and visceral. These sensory qualities heighten my relationship with the work and I see no reason to suppress this. I wish you to experience it. We rely on muscle memory to perform actions. Perhaps it follows that a certain amount of emotional memory might be required in the making of art, to draw upon a recollection of things felt.’

 -excerpt from the catalogue for ‘The Way of All Flesh’