Predominantly working as a painter, Jamie Bragg (b. 2001, Watford) is an artist who seeks to explore the intersection between photographic and analogue modes of image-making. Embracing his generation's easy relationship to the photographic image, Jamie exclusively works from preexisting imagery, culled from sources such as family photographs and online referents. His paintings intricately blend quotidian subject matter with personal experience, splicing together individual and collective memories to capture the tender intricacies of mundane life. Through his layered and scratched pools of pigment, Jamie explores ideas of identity, grief, isolation, desire and safety.

Once a subject reveals itself, Jamie sets about rendering it in oils on either salvaged wood or stretched canvas, utilising a range of techniques, from areas of impasto and passages of scumbling, to the scratching and sweeping of paint from the surface, dissolving the absolute clarity of the subject. For the artist, how the paint is handled in relation to its photographic referent holds a particular significance - oscillating between more representational and abstract modes of paint application to best nurture narrative engagement. Alongside such painterly methods, Jamie brutally crops many of his compositions - stripping his photographic referent of any context, recognisable narrative or didactic function. By allowing the image to fade away from easy perception, Jamie’s paintings vibrate between coherence and illegibility, exploring an image's power to simultaneously communicate and withhold. 

More recently, Jamie has been working from a series of photographs taken by his great grandfather while he was a serviceman stationed in North Africa and the Levant. At once dark and luminous, the compositions ranging from serene pastel landscapes of grazing cows to endearing scenes of comradeship, are somewhat otherworldly. These tender re-imaginings simultaneously entice and repel, awkwardly pitting the violent and problematic context of the original photographs against the somewhat alluring nature of a painted image. Within these compositions, the archive becomes a site for introspection, exploring family relationships, heritage, ideas of masculinity, and the ways we as private individuals might be complicit in larger political narratives of exploitation.