Moor Lands
- Altair Brandon-Salmon
- Jun 25
- 2 min read
Words by Altair Brandon-Salmon
A solo exhibition of Jethro Jackson’s recent work at Projects Twenty Two, will reveal how his elusive, gestural painting finds a rhythm with the landscape.
Deeply embedded within the sublime, harsh atmosphere of north Cornwall, Jackson’s work rhymes with the shifting layers of colour and texture that mark the land. His practice, bringing to mind the work of modernist painters like Peter Lanyon and the severe confrontation with nature found in the work of Winslow Homer, reveals a Cornish world that is haunted by ghosts and animals. He makes us see the world anew, as though he has the agile, hovering perspective of a buzzard.
Drawing together new work alongside drawings and prints, the exhibition will show how Jackson moves across different media where he finds the space between representation and abstraction. It will show how his process responds to the weight of paint and the pull of graphite and show his engagement with the elements of an ever-fluctuating landscape.
These responses to nature place Jackson in the lineage of modern British artists, whose work is suspended in the ambiguous zone between representation and abstraction: from the painting of Frank Auerbach to Leon Kossoff, to the inscrutable marking of the land by Richard Long, British artists since 1945 have been drawn to environments which are jagged, a little edgy, a little inscrutable. They draw our attention to the inexplicable already present in the land: the megaliths which dot the wild moors, the depressions in the ground where there was once a building, centuries or millennia ago – the landscape is already composed of abstract forms which refuse an easy explanation.
For Jackson, his work suggests the constant movement and morphing of the world, how a beam of sunlight might briefly pass across a field, or how the wind shapes a tree for a moment, so that life emerges when it is least expected. He channels this energy into the restless creases of paint across the surface of his work, where he reworks and then reworks again figures, shapes, and colours, trying to find a pattern that will give expression to his own emotions and ferment new experiences in his viewers.
This intuitive connection to the environment grounds even his most abstract painting, creating a world that his audience can fall into. Art becomes an engine of feeling – that is where Jackson’s power as an artist resides. From the minute particulars of the North Cornish landscape, he is able to create art that has a far more universal resonance, anchored in the force of colour, the pull of a brushstroke, the twist of a form. The viewer asks, is that a bird? Or a figure? A movement in the land? A shadow of what once was? The work yields no easy answers. The pleasure is all in the asking, and the beauty lies in Jackson’s restless curiosity about the world, seen through his distinctive eye.
Curated by Dr Altair Brandon-Salmon of Stanford University, Jethro Jackson: Moor Lands opens on 12th August 2025 at Projects Twenty Two, Rock.
LEFT: April 14 RIGHT: April 19
