Jamie Frost

Jamie Frost is a fine artist who makes sculptures and drawings. His career to date has been diverse, from award-winning portrait sculptor to staging a touring exhibition of large scale drawings and sculpture.

Figures collide and writhe around on huge sheets of paper. The artist, often on hands and knees, pushes, scuffs, and delineates a cartoon that serves as the basis for future works in paint and 3 dimensions. These cartoons are a work in progress, being re-used, edited and altered until the fragile surfaces become littered with boot prints and taped-up rips.

In the painted works that emerge from this, clean open colour fields are occupied by bold figure-marks. The activity on the surface is sparing but powerful-suggesting all that is bodily. Coiled up energy barely released, sopping wet brush marks. The grubby, tender heaviness of fleshy beings full of hopes, fears and desires.

Overall there’s a dual sense of the figure as a powerful and vulnerable force. The artist obsessed with fallibility as an expression of the core human experience, determined that it should be expressed beautifully. When asked about his influences, the romance of mannerist sculpture pushes against the corporality of butoh theatre. There’s dynamic movement, an acceptance of flux and change.