Jamie Frost (born 1977, UK) depicts the tenderness and recklessness of fleshy beings full of hopes, fears and desires. There is fallibility in the work, the artist drawing upon personal and collective trials and triumphs. Uneasy landscapes hint at ecological and political breakdown, physiological instability is presented in brief fragmented forms. Figures resist and comfort each other in works that recall social and personal dynamics.
With a growing sense of the precarious, Jamie puts hunks of moist green timber together in dynamic poses, punctuating them with delicate and intimately carved details. He paints broad figure-marks, sparing but visceral, suggesting all that is bodily. Coiled up energy is barely released as sopping wet brush strokes.
His work has been shown widely, including a touring solo exhibition. Features include: Creative Boom; Considering Art podcast; The Yorkshire Post; The Guardian; The Times; Daily Telegraph, among others. He has been shortlisted for the Materiality Matters prize, the Alpine Fellowship Visual Arts Prize, the Cotswold Sculpture Park ‘sculpture of the year’ award and the New Light Sculpture Prize. Previously he has been awarded the Society of Portrait Sculptors’ Talos award and membership of the Royal Society of Sculptors.
Image courtesy of David Fulford
“The figures in my work are a feral, unguarded people. They scrabble around ambitiously, trip and fall, leap up, push and kick, kneel in veneration. They are contradictions. Understanding them is like trying to step in the same stream twice.
Humans are vulnerable but powerful, we recognise that in each other. The possibilities held within ourselves are intoxicating. Such a vital, overwhelming force can wreak havoc or perform miracles. We should welcome that duality. We can take comfort from the chaotic world we experience, and our part in it, without judgement.
I am compelled by the physicality of things, objects, the landscape, other people, of myself. This is the language I draw upon when making, the things we feel most deeply show physically in our bodies. We are corporeal manifestations of our experiences.
To physically embody a state of acceptance in an artwork, to observe and reflect the beautiful mess, is enabling for me. Inviting humanity's complex, fugitive nature into your life is terrifying and exhilarating. It is a hopeful act in a wild world. “
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