Jasmine Mansbridge

Michael Reid Northern Beaches is pleased to present our first solo exhibition from Jasmine Mansbridge, whose series, Poetry Buried in Geometry, began with an artist residency at the Château d’Orquevaux in France.

“I have always loved to travel and create work in new environments; my subconscious absorbs and then produces new elements within my practice,” says Mansbridge, speaking with Jen Bishop of The Interiors Addict in a recent profile.

The result of Mansbridge’s French foray is her first Show in Sydney since 2018 – a collection of bold and brilliant paintings that tap into undercurrents of warmth, emotion and poeticism within graphic compositions that could otherwise appear slick and hard-edge.

This quieter, handmade sensibility peeks through in the painterly details of her optically charged, architectural works – a dynamic aptly described by her series’ title – bringing shades of nuance to the angular forms and trippy patterns of her dazzlingly constructed worlds.

“The paintings always start with a pencil drawing on stretched raw linen,” says the artist, whose work can sit beautifully within a contemporary interior or bring a moment of frisson to an otherwise classic home. “I then fill the space with white gesso and add colour last. This preserves my original mark and the energy of the idea.”

Within these pieces I can see the visual influence of French architecture and decoration, and the repertoire of devices I use to construct and support the narrative within my work has been expanded. The show title and concept; ‘Poetry Buried in Geometry’ – emerged as a means to explain an overarching idea that our ways of being can be divided into two parts. Our poetry and our geometry. If the geometry is the fixed point in our lives: the structure, the unchangeable immovable part, then the poetry is the emotion, the feelings, the soft and the flowing. The juxtaposition of these elements feels like a warm and poetic approach to an ever more complex world.”