Thank you to everyone who came to the Private View of Tender. It was so great to share it with so many friends and supporters. It really meant a lot to me!
Tender Private View this Friday
Please come along, I’d love to show you the work I’ve made, including a site-specific installation where unruly paintings spill across the gallery wall.
Tender - solo show at Southwark Park Galleries
I’m really looking forward to the opening of my solo show Tender at Southwark Park Galleries on Friday 18th July 6-8pm in the Salter Space. Everyone welcome.
The exhibition runs until 21st September.
Selected for RA Summer Exhibition 2025
So pleased to be selected for the Summer Exhibition for the third year in a row (sporting folks tell me it’s called ‘a three-peat’). My small painting called ‘Apart from that, everything’s fine’ is hung high up in room VI, and I’m delighted it was bought at the buyers preview. Excitingly, the RA are also making a poster print of it to sell in the RA shop, so please do go look for it if you visit (only £18).
The exhibition opens to the public on Tuesday 17th June and runs until 17th August, at the Royal Academy of Arts, Picadilly, London. It seems to be rated as the best Summer Exhibition for several years. The Guardian gave it a ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ review.
Here’s a picture of me, very happy at Varnishing Day!
Shortlisted for RA Summer Exhibition 2025
I can’t believe I’ve been shortlisted again for the RA Summer Exhibition. Please keep your fingers crossed for my painting ‘Apart from that, everything’s fine’, 2024, acrylic on linen, 22x28cm. The theme of this year’s exhibition is Dialogues:
“The Royal Academy Summer Exhibition 2025 will be dedicated to art’s capacity to forge dialogues and to afford us sensitivity towards societal concerns, such as ecology, survival and living together.”
Farshid Moussavi RA, coordinator of Summer Exhibition 2025
Living together is certainly one of my key themes… but the chances of being selected 3 years in a row is pretty slim. Results are announced on Friday 30th May. But making it down from 18,500 entries to the shortlist of c.5,000 is something I’m already pretty darn proud of.
Thank you to everyone who visited
Thank you so much to everyone who visited us as part of Artists’ Open House this year. It was the busiest I’ve ever done, with over 300 people coming over 2 days. Jane Hughes and I are so grateful for everyone’s support.
Dulwich Artists' Open House 17 & 18th May 2025
Very happy to be opening the doors to our house again as part of Dulwich Artists’ Open House 2025.
This year I’m joined by the talented Jane Hughes whose beautiful paintings hint at the stories of forgotten women and children overlooked in official ‘history’. They will sit alongside my abstract paintings which celebrate the invisible work of family life, and we hope will make a fun and thought-provoking display. Do drop by to take a look if you can.
We are ONLY open for the SECOND weekend of the festival (both weeekends is just too much to juggle with tbe family!).
Saturday 17th & Sunday 18th May 2025
11am - 6pm
Children welcome
See https://dulwichfestival.co.uk/open-house/jess-blandford-jane-hughes/ for more details and other artists exhibiting nearby
Thoughts about The Weight of Things
Thoughts on The Weight of Things
an exhibition by FOLD Art Collective at Morley Gallery, 25-30 March 2025.
“... the present is always the best time to spread your arms wide and embrace the whole world, all at once, as best you can.” Marianne Fritz, The Weight of Things (1978)
That FOLD Art Collective have borrowed their title from the novel by Marianne Fritz (often described as the overlooked female James Joyce), feels appropriate. This rediscovered modernist text holds much within its slim 144 pages. It is bleak and very funny; domestic and political; heavy and light. The narrative loops and confuses. Not much and everything happens in this story in which Berta longs to protect her children from ‘the weight of things’.
The times we live in feel particularly weighty right now (though perhaps they always have). What are we to do with this sense of burden? How can we carry all that seems to be happening everywhere all at once? And how can this sit with pleasure, or with a lightness of touch? With irreverence or tenderness? We might secretly agree with Hollywood icon Ava Gardner’s remark that: “deep down, I’m pretty superficial”. Or perhaps rather than seeking buoyancy, we find we crave gravitas. Needing to feel ourselves grounded, not untethered. The weight of things is more complicated than mass = density x volume.
The 11 artists in this show prefer questions to formula. They explore the weight of emotional loads: memories and grief, hopes and fears, identities and responsibilities. All are curious about the physicality of made objects, and the experience of being a tangible presence in space (including landscape), where gravity and atmospheric pressures take effect. Consumption, abundance, scarcity and fragility are all manifest, and often overwhelming. Some things float while others sink.
Hold in your mind that all these works are made by a female art collective who meet monthly to discuss their work. The collaborative SHELVED Project (featured in this show) is a reminder that this group is a supportive structure as well as a forum for critique.
The members of FOLD Art Collective are spreading their arms wide, but as Maira Kalman writes in ‘Women Holding Things’:
“sometimes, when I am feeling particularly happy or content, I think I can provide sustenance for legions of human beings. I can hold the entire world in my arms. Other times, I can barely cross the room. And I drop my arms. Frozen.”
FOLD seem to know this truth. They have taken Fritz’s words - “as best you can” - to heart. It’s all any of us can do.
www.foldartcollective.com @foldartcollective
Winning the 2024 SPG Prize
I am ridiculously proud and excited to have won the 2024 Southwark Park Galleries Annual Winter Open prize. A huge thank you to the artists Joy Lubinjo and Paul Purgas for selecting my painting ‘Creeping Shoulds’ (2024, acrylic on linen 27x22cm).
The prize is a solo show in the Salter Space at the gallery in Autumn 2025. I am so grateful for this amazing opportunity. 🙏
installation view of Winter Open 2024
Southwark Park Gallery Winter Open 2024
I’m delighted to have two paintings in the the Southwark Park Gallery Winter Open. An annual fundraiser for this inspiring and prestigious gallery space.
The exhibition is open to the public 11-6pm Weds-Sundays until the 14th December 2024. All the works are for sale and are priced under £750.
See their website for more details or to buy any of the artworks in the show online.
(Un)visible with FOLD Art Collective
Thank you to everyone who came along to our exhibition at Safehouse in Peckham in September. We were so pleased with how the show was received, and grateful to all our visitors. Next show with FOLD Art Collective will be in March 2025… can’t wait.
Participating Artists: @abigailelverd_artist, @art_and_eleanor @artfledgling, @carmenart_vh, @cass.breen, @clare_nicholson_prints, @hughes.jane60, @jessblandford, @katherinerose360, @mmiabeard@nell.martin.artist
(Un)Visible Exhibition - Private View Friday 27th September
Please join FOLD Art Collective for our exhibition (Un)Visible which opens on Friday 27th September at Safehouse 1 in Peckham. Private View 6-9pm. Exhibition open Saturday 28th-Monday 30th September, 12pm-7pm.
RA Summer Exhibition 2024
Thank you so much to everyone who went along to the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition and saw my painting ‘Prams in Hallways’ hanging in room 2. I’m so grateful to Hughie O’Donoghue for selecting it, and to the collector who bought it before the exhibition even opened to the public. This is the second year I’ve been selected but the first time I could go to Varnishing Day. It’s such a special day where all the artists walk in procession down Picadilly to St James’ for the ‘blessing of the artists’ service before heading back to the gallery to admire each others’ work.
FOLD Art Collective
The female art collective I have been a member of since 2021 has three new members and a great new name. We’re now called FOLD Art Collective. We are twelve women artists who developed their art practices following other careers and responsibilities. We meet monthly to critique and encourage each other's work in progress. It’s a hugely sustaining part of my practice!
Shelved
Underneath it all
Jess Blandford, 2024
Oil paint on ready-made shelf
20 x 60 x 15cm
Not for sale
My contribution to a collaborative project called SHELVED with the Second Shift Art Collective.
The shelf is empty. Usually a space to keep precious things safe. To show off prized possessions. The shelf itself goes unnoticed. An everyday, mundane structure at eye level. So ordinary, you might walk past without even seeing it. But bend and twist your body, duck and peer beneath. You’ll spot something seeping down the struts that hold this shelf up. On the underside is an oil painting. Layers of gestural marks, pools of colour, messy scribbles and erasures. Abstract expressionism - traditionally full of machismo and high cultural value - here hidden. Trying to pay tribute to the invisible work of support. Physical, mental & emotional loads often carried without being seen or valued. The unpaid labour of care that quietly holds up global economies, as well as our everyday lives.
The Second Shift Art Collective is a group of women artists who have developed their art practices later in life, following other careers & responsibilities. Throughout 2024 each of the 12 artists in the group are invited to make work in response to the idea of an ordinary domestic shelf.
Each month one artist brings her ‘shelf’ to the group crit for discussion, and writes a short text to accompany the work. In this way the project accumulates over a year, with the collection of ‘shelves’ influenced by previous ideas and the ongoing discussion. The project will be seen unfolding throughout the year on Instagram and will culminate in an exhibition of all 12 works in 2025.
Follow on instagram @second.shift_art.collective
Artists' Open House 2024 Brochure
So delighted that my painting Good Enough (Green) has been chosen for the front cover of the brochure for this year’s Dulwich Festival Artists’ Open House. Please do drop by to see my latest abstract paintings and drawings and. some limited edition prints. This year I’m only open the first weekend of the festival (11th and 12th May 11am-6pm), so come then to avoid disappointment!
Shortlisted for the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition 2024
I’m delighted this painting has been shortlisted for the RA Summer Exhibition 2024:
Prams in Hallways, 2023.
Acrylic & Charcoal on linen
25x36cm
I named it after the famous quote by literary critic Cyril Connolly from ‘Enemies of Promise’ published in 1938.
“There is no more sombre enemy of good art than the pram in the hallway”
The theme of this year’s RA Summer Exhibition is ‘Making Space’, and the selection committee is headed up by Ann Christopher, and includes Cornelia Parker (a hero of mine). Like many of my paintings it tries to express something of the complexity and intensity of the physical, emotional and mental load of family life. The world has changed immeasurably since Cyril Connolly was writing (about male creativity) in 1938, but the challenge of making ‘good art’ (or good anything!) without mental and physical space certainly persists. Recently my ‘hallways’ have felt very full of ‘prams’ as my studio time has been severely curtailed by unexpected additional childcare responsibilities. That’s why it means so much that this painting has been ‘seen’ by the judges.
Keep your fingers crossed that it makes it to the final selection!
Installation Views of Layers of Being Exhibition by the Second Shift Art Collective
Some installation photos from the Second Shift Art Collective’s inaugural show at Safehouse 2, Peckham in December 2023.
The Second Shift Art Collective, December 2023
Layers of Being - Second Shift Art Collective at Safehouse
Layers of Being is the inaugural show of the Second Shift Art Collective. The works of the 9 artists involved, weave together stories, memories, secrets, objects, time and identities. The show includes paintings, textiles, sculpture, video and print-making, exhibited in the forgotten space of a derelict Victorian terraced house in Peckham. The works engage with this eroded domestic space.
Friday 8th December: Private View: 6-9pm
Saturday 9th & Sunday 10th December: 11am-5pm
Monday 11th December: 11am-2pm.
Safe House 2
137 Copeland Road
London, SE15 3SN
The Second Shift Art Collective is a group of women artists who have developed their art practice later in life, following other careers. The independent work the collective produces crosses many disciplines including: sculpture, painting, drawing, printmaking, photography and installation; and the artists’ interests are wide-ranging. What holds the Collective together is a shared sensitivity to materials, time and space; to the depth of other experiences that each artist brings to her practice; and to the relational contexts in which work is created.
The Collective meets in person monthly to critique and encourage one another’s work in progress, and uses whatsapp as a collaborative forum to inspire, rage, laugh, cheer and galvanise.
The Second Shift Collective has this agenda at its heart: to generously give support, space and voice to the work of mid-life women artists who are often invisible in contemporary culture.
@abigailelverd_artist
@artfledgling
@cass.breen
@clare_nicholson_prints
@art_and_eleanor
@francesca.giuliano.here
@jessblandford
@katherinerose360
@nell.martin.artist
A Conversation - Jeannie Avent Gallery 25th November - 3rd December 2023
This exhibition brings my recent abstract paintings into conversation with Marina Beard’s poetic skyscapes. Marina & I are both resident artists at the Mansion in Beckenham Place Park. The work is very different but our daily discussions about art and life fuels both practices.
On Friday 1st December we are having a relaxed Private View from 6-8.30pm. Please do drop by and join us for a friendly chat and a drink while you see the work. Hope to see you there.
Find us at the Jeannie Avent Gallery, 14 North Cross Road, East Dulwich, London, SE22 9EU
Opening Hours
Saturday 25th November 10am - 6pm
Sunday 26th November 10am - 6pm
Thursday 30th November 10am - 3pm
Friday 1st December 12pm - 5pm
Friday 1st Private View 6pm - 8.30pm
Saturday 2nd December 10am - 6pm
Sunday 3rd December 10am - 6pm
