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Jessica Gale's paintings begin with direct encounters with place. While rooted in the observed landscape, they reach beyond description to explore folklore, history and the stories that linger within the land.

Trained at the Newlyn School of Art and Heatherleys, Jessica works both plein air and in her studio in Dorset, moving between the two in a continuous dialogue between direct observation and the demands of the painting itself. She paints on unconventional surfaces including copper and cardboard, drawn to their resistance and their capacity to hold marks differently from canvas.

Her work is shaped by a Fauvist instinct for colour and by painters she returns to repeatedly: Edvard Munch, James McNeill Whistler and Richard Diebenkorn. Landscape, for Jessica, is never neutral. The Thames foreshore is a recurring subject, a place where the tide withdraws to reveal layers of mud, debris and history before covering them again. Themes of erosion, flooding, and deep time in the land run quietly through the paintings.

These are not records of how places look. They are records of how it feels to stand inside them.

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