Jasmine Mowbray

'Moonstone', 2025, is from Jasmine Mowbray's ongoing 'Nocturne' series, where the artist considers how night time reflections on water surfaces can hold at once a record of plants (such as thistles), stars, and the wider cosmos on a single plane. This painting is composed intuitively, with Mowbray responding to the qualities of layered water-based paint before working into the surface with oil mediums.

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.