Peel Park, The Crescent
Sat 29 Aug · Free
Join the artist as she officially opens her fist solo exhibition at Salford Museum & Art Gallery! Don’t miss out! Also joining us at Jessica’s preview is current exhibiting artist Dawn Woolley. Join Dawn later that day for a last look at her exhibition ‘Relics: Objects of Devotion for Contemporary Life’, which closes on 30th August. Informal speeches at 1pm. Refreshments provided. FREE, booking required. Exhibition information Jessica Brodigan (b. 2001, Manchester, UK) is a painter exploring parallel spaces and figures as vehicles to explore memory, identity and vulnerability. Translated through a palette oscillating between softness and unease; fleshy pinks, muted greens, bruised blues and luminous creams reflect an emotional ambiguity where the beauty holds tension. Enigmatic figures and ornate creatures inhabit these fluid, psychologically charged landscapes, existing in constant states of transformation. Bodies dissolve into the land, clouds become flesh, water behaves emotionally rather than physically, and forms continuously shift between human, natural and mythical states. The soft luminosity, theatrical figuration and ornamental movement of her work takes influence from Pre-Raphaelite and Rococo painting, which Jessica metabolises and destabilises into a contemporary conversation. The work holds a subtle tension and dreamlike instability between protection and unease, through research into monuments and watchful figures, such as the Westbury White Horse. Within the work, these presences subconsciously occupy a liminal space between comfort, memory and surveillance. Through intuitive mark-making and layered surfaces that often reveal traces of earlier compositions, the work remains alive, resisting immediate interpretation, allowing viewers to slowly move through the intimate, mythic psychologically unresolved worlds that feels both familiar and quietly uncanny. On display in our Park Gallery from Saturday 29 August 2026 to Sunday 7 February 2027.