Jasmine Mowbray
Artist's Statement
Jasmine Mowbray’s imagined landscapes are built from fractured memory and empirical experience within the natural and built world. Fascinated by reflections in water and the act of moving through her surroundings, Mowbray transforms these encounters into alternate spaces—mirrors that expose hidden complexities within familiar settings. She subverts the conventions of landscape painting, altering compositional ratios to prioritise the foreground as the dominant element on the artwork’s surface. Suspending gravity and collapsing sky, water and vegetation into a single plane, Mowbray disorients the viewer, constructing an imagined cosmological experience within a dismantled chronology of time.
Rather than working towards a fixed image, Mowbray treats the studio as a space to be worked through, joining forces with her materials rather than imposing a plan onto them. Her paintings propose alternate spaces that reveal hidden complexities within familiar settings, each artwork a portal that transforms fleeting moments into enduring visual experiences, underscoring her relationship with the shared environment. Integral to Mowbray’s painting process is the practice of restraint and consideration as she applies and removes paint to articulate the positive and negative space. Her paintings often resemble techniques used in drawing and printmaking, by which oil and water-based mediums are used to stain, scrape, repel, and absorb the pigment into the surface, creating an illusion of spatial depth.
Biography
Jasmine Mowbray (b. 2003) lives and works on Gadigal land in Sydney, Australia. She graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Art from the National Art School in 2024. She has been a finalist in several significant art prizes, including the Sir John Sulman Art Prize (2025) at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, the winner of the People’s Choice Award and the Mayor’s Pick Award in the Waverley Art Prize (2024), and the winner of the People’s Choice Award in the Macquarie Group Emerging Artist Prize (2024). Her work has been exhibited across Sydney in several public and private art institutions, including at the Art Gallery of NSW and Hurstville Museum and Gallery.
