Juliette Blightman

Everyday life and moments of shared intimacy act as catalysts for Juliette Blightman’s practice. Working fluidly between painting, drawing, sculpture, performance and film, Blightman tussles out smaller moments from her daily life to create tender portraits of her friends, family and the cities she encounters. With a deep sense of care, Blightman might focus on the minute details of a smile, the warmth of a domestic interior or the beauty of a city scene. Her installations often combine different media, with frames from a montage film being crystallised in a drawing, or a sculpture recreating a scene found within the moving images. Interested in the messiness of memory, Blightman continues to question the notion of radical subjectivity. Time for example is something which fascinates the artist, “time between myself and my subject, the moment of the photograph, the time the audience is invited to spend with the paintings and the life the works will have once the exhibition has come to an end”. These continual public and private interactions each work undergoes adds a sense of impactful transference to each piece. The evident adoration for her subjects echoes the sensitivity of other portrait artists such as David Hockney, Alice Neal or Chantal Joffe, yet Blightman’s weaving of painting with other media brings these specific questions of subjectivity into the fold. ...