About

Jessica Ward (b. 1987, Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland) is a painter working between Oakura, Taranaki, and Auckland.

Working in oils, she paints the point where a figure is about to become paint, or paint is about to become a figure. Bodies, faces and landscapes are built up, smeared back and painted over until they are only half there: a limb within a field of colour, a crowd that might be foliage.

The paintings don’t offer a story. They ask you to keep looking. Forms surface, slip away and return, so that what you recognise is never quite settled, held somewhere between memory, landscape and the body.