My Story - Jessica Malousis
Jessica is a Brisbane artist and teacher, creating and exhibiting in a range of drawing and painting, mixed media and un-edited macro photography. Her current direction is influenced by the often overlooked elements that lie within and around local environments, with themes of contrast forming the context of her practice in direct response to her experiences and immediate environments.
Jessica graduated with a dual degree in Creative Industries (visual arts) and Secondary Education (Hon Class 1. QUT). She found many of the studio based arts courses to be dissatisfying and missing quality teaching of many basic skill sets fine artists need. As a young person confronted by many new experiences, Jessica was perplexed by the age old question 'what is art?' of which modernism challenged. In a perfect environment to explore this, Jessica asked one of her University teachers to assist her in finding answers. This teacher however responded negatively and was not open to working through her questions. This disappointment was temporarily replaced with her love of teaching, though she continued to explore forms of artistic expression.
This experience became pivotal in Jessica's life and her current views and works are highly influenced by this. Although Jessica completed a visual arts degree, due to the lack of skills taught, many of her fine art skill sets are self-taught. The new challenge of motherhood has seen Jessica reignite her practice more fully.
Her current works can be described as fairly illustrative. She is a life long learner and hungry to take on new things - therefore the concepts of creative bravery, experimentation and mess are important; as well as excellent foundations flavoured with modern twists.
Artist Statement
Discoveries of earthiness and the often ‘un-noticed’ smaller elements in our natural ecosystem form a strong part of the motivation channelling my direction in recent pieces.
My photographic and fine art works endeavour to share wonderment of our natural everyday environments either in macro Working with fluid materials aids my efforts to juxtapose the predictable and the unpredictable both in application of material as well as conceptually.
I love beautiful and quirky things - many of my pieces are aesthetically pleasing.
The manmade, although in contrast, also becomes a part of our natural environment and influence of my work. My suburban town-house garden became an outlet when my first son was born, opening my eyes wider to the beauty of our natural eco-system (in macro) and how essential it is to our well-being. This is now integral to my paintings, drawings and (purposefully un-edited) photography. Juxtaposing composition and colour play, patterns, unusual and wonderful insects, and narrative are essentials in recent pieces.
I am currently developing a body of work in photography and fine art - through which I am exploring notions of narrative and our lives saturated with editing, including our own selective inclusion of what we show from our daily lives - social media being a strong element of this. My photography is directly informing my paintings and drawings.
