Jesse Thompson

Jesse's works explore the hollowing that follows profound loss — the way grief carves a person from the inside out, leaving an unrecognisable self in its wake. Healing, here, is never linear. Instead, it unfolds in increments: a slow rebuilding, a tentative regrowth, a radical reorientation of who one is allowed to become. Jesse’s portraits sit inside this threshold space between collapse and renewal. 

Materially, the works carry this vulnerability in their very making. The raw, intentionally unfinished surfaces reflect the precariousness of life and the hesitations of the grieving mind. The handmade linen grounds the paintings in tenderness — an analogue to touch, care, and memory. Jesse’s colour palette is chosen intuitively; pigments are selected by emotional gravity, by the tug of certain memories, or by the resonance of personal relationships. The result is a visual language that feels at once instinctive and precise — portraits that not merely depictions of faces but cartographies of loss, devotion, and the slow, miraculous work of finding oneself again.