The Theatrics of Nature: Jessica Brodigan

About this event

Jessica Brodigan (b. 2001, Manchester, UK) is a painter exploring parallel spaces and figures as vehicles to explore memory, identity and vulnerability. Her palette translates an oscillation 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.