The Armory Show New York: Caroline Jackson

Sim Smith is delighted to present Forego, a new body of work by Caroline Jackson for The Armory Show New York, open from 24th to 27th of September. 

In this new body of work, Jackson steps into an uncharted terrain where temporal echoes and raw intuition collide. Shifting from the specific familiar landscapes and memories which once anchored her work, Jackson’s practice dives deeper into her intuitive process. Stepping into the unknown, Jackson surrenders to a more fluid, instinctive journey, with each painting taking a life of its own. 

“All of my work always starts the same way. I try and go into something with an open mind and with the willingness to experiment.”

“I always see my paintings as a separate entity to myself, evolving and moving at its own rate. Even if I’m the person who’s dictating and creating this composition, putting things where I want them to be, it is something existing separate to myself and having its own journey, that I’m really there to find this pulse or rhythm within a work.”

In contrast to her exploratory approach, an essential tool remains central to Jackson’s process. “I use my favourite paintbrush,” she says, “which is the one I’ve used for 85% of all of my works”. In her visceral strokes and tactile layers of colour and texture, Jackson constructs the underlying structure of her work as an unseen scaffold, anchoring each composition like bones under flesh. “As you build it up, it might not be visible when it comes to the end of the piece, but it’s still within there, somewhere.”

“There’s a spirit of landscape and time that comes through when I make something. I think that’s where the idea of memory comes from as well, as lots of the time when looking at abstract painting you feel as though it’s familiar even though you’re not quite sure where it is or what you’re looking at. I’m always striving to create some semblance of a sensory world we can all occupy in some way.”

Jackson creates spaces that feel deeply resonant and strangely whole. Light, dusky pinks and embers of orange scatter across the works, a vibrant residue of the prolonged British summer that was only seen later, as if excavated in retrospect. With every stroke and gesture the works are shaped by touch, vulnerability, and the unexpected ways the past surfaces in the present.