Jasmine Mowbray

Jasmine Mowbray’s 'Garnet', 2025 employs a circular composition to present an intimate, ‘micro’ study drawn from a larger painting the artist created concurrently - one that references an expansive body of water, such as a lake. Using her distinct staining process, Mowbray creates a central reflective surface that feels subtly pulled back, sitting in deliberate contrast to the more granular, mineral qualities of the bordering shrubbery that frames the work.

Mowbray’s imagined landscapes are composed of her own memories and empirical experiences within the natural world. Fascinated by reflections in water and the experience of moving through the natural world, Jasmine examines how these visual experiences create alternate spaces - mirrors that reveal hidden complexities within familiar settings. Mowbray subverts traditional conventions of landscape paintings by altering the compositional ratios, prioritising the foreground as a major element that dominates the artwork’s surface. By suspending gravity and collapsing elements like the sky, water and vegetation into one plane, Mowbray disorients the viewer to create an imagined cosmological experience within a dismantled chronology of time.

Mowbray proposes alternate spaces that reveal hidden complexities within familiar settings. Each artwork serves as 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.