• Caroline Jackson

    Forego

    The Armory Show

  • Sim Smith is delighted to present 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. 

  • Caroline Jackson, Verdure, 2026, oil, acrylic and oil pastel on canvas, 200 × 310 cm (78¾ × 122 in) diptych

  • “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.”

  • Caroline Jackson, Apex, 2026, oil, acrylic and oil pastel on canvas, 175 × 135 cm (68⅞× 53⅛ in)

  • In contrast to her exploratory approach, an essential tool remains central to Jackson’s process. “I use my favourite paintbrush,” she...

    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, grounding 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.”

  • Caroline Jackson, Splinter, 2026, 195 × 165 cm (76¾ × 65 in)

  • “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.”

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  • Caroline Jackson, Celadon, 2025, oil, acrylic and oil pastel on canvas, 110 × 110 cm (43¼ × 43¼ in)

  • 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.

  • Caroline Jackson is an abstract painter originally from East Sussex; now living and working in London. After graduating from The...

    Caroline Jackson is an abstract painter originally from East Sussex; now living and working in London. After graduating from The Slade School of Art in 2022, Jackson now continues her practice here in London. Jackson’s work explores the instinctive nature of painting, informed by feeling and intuition. Often architectural forms seamlessly meld with organic contours of landscapes, dissolving distinctions between natural and built environments. Vivid planes of colour, shape and line are all in the pursuit of harmony and balance. Caught in a perpetual state of becoming, Jackson’s work constantly mediate between moments of serene beauty and chaos: welcoming a viewer into a network of captured moments and shapes. Whether physical or metaphorical, such transitory spaces ultimately evoke periods of growth, decay and impermanence.