About PM/AM
PM/AM is a contemporary art gallery located on the border of Soho and Fitzorovia in the heart of London. It hosts a busy programme of shows across the two exhibition floors of the Eastcastle Street space. The gallery’s lower ground floor studio provides the location for a residency space for international and under-represented artists to develop their practice. Together the spaces form a unique cultural and creative hub in the bustling centre of the city.
PM/AM’s mission is to reflect through art how we engage with ourselves and the world today, expressed through the artists it is fortunate enough to work with. Recent graduates, those emerging into the spotlight and in their mid-careers on the international stage all feature across a dynamic programme. The gallery works on the vanguard of the emerging art sector, responsible for finding artists of tomorrow, and is keen to explore and present work originating from the many interlocking diasporas of the world. PM/AM’s plays a part in the incubation of contemporary art’s future by representing a carefully selected roster of artists, working with them to initiate and grow lasting careers in the global art world.
As a dynamic arts organisation PM/AM’s activities extend beyond exhibitions into consultation, publications and editorial, providing the means to facilitate placements with collectors and institutions, and create extended content to further support and expose the artists we work with. This self-contained structure is key to the gallery’s broad outlook and capabilities, however we value collaborations with external writers, curators and other galleries to realise our goals.
Exhibition Text
In Caroline Jackson’s abstract paintings the viewer is welcomed into a network of captured moments, where the performative artist’s decisions and movements are imprinted onto the canvas in a strangely intoxicating web. Concentrating mainly on larger format work, the space offered presents an opportunity to engage the whole body in motion, resulting in highly expressive and boldly constructed work.
Created on a residency in London earlier this year, this body of work was subject to a time limitation that required a more assertive and decisive process. Such urgency reduces the potential for strokes to be rectified, and in the work this urgency shows as vibrancy, as energy. It also requires an acute sense of intuition in the way a work comes together, from its inception to the point where it is considered complete. Caroline does not produce preliminary sketches, nor does she refer to existing imagery; the elements that make up her paintings emerge into immediate finality.
Despite a freeform approach to painting, a keenness to incorporate ideas of balance and harmony lies at the heart of Caroline's work. A square canvas with a notable use of bright yellow, for instance, appears to present a dialogue between background and foreground - enhanced by patches of raw canvas in the corners - and surely supplying the notion of something floral in the minds of some viewers.
In another work we’re faced with a rather more epic, metaphysical realm that appears to embody a sense of fluid motion. The specifics of Caroline’s techniques come into play here. This work, in contrast to the ‘floral’ piece on raw canvas, sits atop a primed surface that creates subtle slippages in the paint, magically enshrining their histories of miniature interactions into the scene. These infuse a sense of magnificence, of the supernatural, into the work, like a dream half remembered or place that is felt but may not exist. In this work we could be looking at a depiction of Heaven and Hell, with Purgatory suspended between.
A unifying characteristic of Caroline’s work is the almost existentialist questioning of the painting process, the materials, the associations and interpretations of a work. She creates the conditions to find solutions, but leaves the solutions themselves open ended. Her imagery is made and broken, fixed, and broken again - layering ghosts of paintings within paintings - seeking out the feeling of conclusion that human beings crave.
This work, however, is confident in the assertion that conclusion is theoretical or at best subjective. Instead, the freedom of abstraction is elevated to a point where answers are unnecessary and superfluous, and the painting itself can satisfy us in ways that eschew the need for words.
- Daniel Mackenzie, March 2023
CV
Caroline Jackson
Born: 2000, Hastings, United Kingdom.
Lives and works in London.
Education
2018 - Foundation Diploma. East Sussex Coast College.
2022 - BFA. Slade School of Fine Art.
Exhibitions
2023 - Friends Indeed, San Francisco.
2023 - Taymour Grahne, London.
2023 - PM/AM, London.
2022 - Samuele Visentin, London.
2022 - Slade School of Fine Art, London.
2022 - Samuele Visentin, London.
2022 - Sim smith. London.
2022 - Guts Gallery, London.
Residency
2023 - PM/AM, London.
Collections include
Aki Abiola
Jane and Roland Cowan Collection
Pippy Houldsworth
HSBC Collection
Alex Klimt
Zelie Walker
Sim Smith
