Small beginnings, big personality. Studio Wolffia, run by Emily Jackson, imagines the banal into the sublime, for example a visual conversation between the pattern on a train seat and a shopping bag becomes joyful abstract art. Wolffia tableaux and sculptures are bright and engaging. From make-up artist to full-time contemporary artist, and mum, Jackson continues to put the personal and emotional at the centre of her work. Once art was a means of making time for herself, now it has gone far beyond that.
In This Moment is her latest show — a poignant, beautiful and personal exhibition that ran with Noho Galleries in London at the end of September just a stone’s throw from Oxford Circus in buzzy Fitzrovia. Inspired by journaling and cultivating a positive mindset, this is a balm to dark skies and shrinking hours of daylight in England right now. Interested in popular culture, modernity and ecstatic bright neons In This Moment by Studio Wolffia encourages us to stop, take a breath and focus on the good.
The exhibited works, and their titles like Forwards Only, intend to evoke Aristotle’s idea of Eudaimonia, a state of happiness that is associated with action, “a state of doing” according to Psychology Today. Whether it’s the joy of painting alone or dancing in a group, the primacy of immediate pleasure is very much tied to our modern psyche. In other words, we want to be happy and right away. Carnivalesque patterns and loud eye-catching colours collage a plethora of references in Jackson’s art, it’s hard not to think of Matisse’s seaweed forms and flowers. Shirley Jaffe is a key reference cited by Jackson, who firmly places In This Moment in the art world, quoting the English philosopher and mathematician Alfred North Whitehead in Dialogues “Art is the imposing of a pattern on experience, and our aesthetic enjoyment is recognition of the pattern.”
Next up for Studio Wolffia is a dive into more tufted furniture objects and an openness to collaboration. Jackson has highlighted the joy of this new medium that is tactile and sensual, “I was looking for something deeper, more enveloping, more tactile and absorbing”. These new objects allow collectors to connect differently to her art objects that are perfectly soft rather than rigid. The wooly pieces yield under a caress. The artist is excited to continue her expansion into more mediums, bigger scale works and projects that are immersive. Optimism is not just at the core of her work but also her philosophy as a creative, and hats off to that.
