MUNTHE ART MONDAY: SHERRIE-LEIGH JONES

Name: SHERRIE-LEIGH JONES
Website: sherrieleighjones.com
Instagram: @sherrieleighjonesart

Please introduce yourself and tell us about what you do

I’m Sherrie-Leigh Jones and I am an Artist and Printmaker based in Brighton, England. I create limited edition and original landscape prints inspired by nature, travel and changing seasons.

To create my prints, I assemble analog and digital collages using my travel photographs and photos taken on walks in the English countryside, which are then combined with paintings, and occasionally found imagery. The finished compositions are then taken into the print studio and the final artworks are hand-printed by me using printmaking techniques and processes such as screen printing and cellulose transfer printing.

I have a continuous series of contemporary Japanese and Chinese style prints that are inspired by traditional Japanese and Chinese landscape paintings, woodblock prints and the kakejiku (aka kakemono), a Japanese hanging scroll, and in particular, Sansuiga (Japan) or Shanshui (China); paintings which depict an idealised landscape, primarily using the forms of mountains, rivers, clouds and mist. Inspiration is also drawn from the Shin-hanga art movement.

Could you explain more about how being a woman has affected your career?

Though I feel that I’ve had to work harder for recognition, I do feel lucky to have had a lot of support and opportunities in my career. Not all of the time, but more often than not this has come from other women artists and females working in the artworld.

The Woolwich Contemporary Print Fair team are great at championing women printmakers and featured me in their Women in Print focus, and more recently exhibited my work as part of Woolwich Editions at Every Woman Biennial in London.

Instagram has been a great platform for highlighting female artists with hashtags such as #womenprintmakers and female curators are forging their way and highlighting other female creatives with interviews etc.

Can you name some other female (artist) that inspires you and explain why they do so?

There are so many but one of my favourite artists is Katie Paterson. If you know me, you know I love anything cosmic, and often working with scientists, her work spans projects from broadcasting the sounds of a melting glacier live, creating a light bulb that simulates the experience of moonlight, mapping all the dead stars, and she has also created a candle that burns down in layers with each layer smelling like a planet or place through the universe. I just love that she makes the incomprehensible comprehensible.

I have a print of one of Hannah Luxton’s Cloud paintings. I’m drawn to her work as she’s inspired by the natural world and the sublime, and I also love her minimalist approach of exploring elements of the natural world that are of a grand scale with the empty space speaking volumes.

Similarly, I’m a fan of the simplicity of the drawn line and the capturing of movement in the work of Kayleigh Harris who I discovered through the Artist Support Pledge via Instagram last year. 

I have also recently discovered the work of Ange Mullen-Bryan through a group exhibition at Irving Contemporary Gallery in Oxford (which is a female owned gallery), sadly I didn’t get the chance to visit, but I guess I’m attracted to her paintings as like with my own work, they have an otherworldliness to them with a mixture of the real and the imagined.

What has been the most challenging aspect of being a female artist?

I think the disparities between male and female artists are being highlighted more these days but I think you still have to work harder for recognition as a female artist.

What would you like people to notice in your art work?

I hope that my work offers the viewer a sense of escapism; a transportation to a new place and a journey through imagined landscapes. A chance to pause from the everyday, reflect and momentarily reconnect with nature with a reminder to slow down and appreciate the small things in life.

Each Monday we bring you a fresh interview with a female artist.

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