In a world where pre-packaged fantasy and entertainment is so pervasive, the child is often overwhelmed by the pressure to harness imagination to the constructs of popular myth and manufactured fiction. Sadly, rather than imagination being used as a means to explore the universe in a personal context, it loses the freedom to create individual myths for the sake of conformance. It seldom survives uninhibited through to adulthood. Jessica Charlotte however has managed to preserve and nurture the child within, enriching her imagination by integrating a child’s power of visioning and interpretive innocence with the mature artist. Her work is the triumph of the child, of freedom, over the imposition of the ordinary.
 

Exhibiting early talent, Jessica was encouraged to draw and her childhood was recorded in pencil and paint. The universe was within, timeless, loving yet at the same time threatening, having the power of dream. There were no boundaries and characters from Jane Austin conversed with Alice in her underground ‘wonderland’ and animals dressed in Elizabethan collars and elaborate costumes explained the mysteries of an unknown world. Here is where the sense of a fragile child navigating nightmare emerged, where perhaps the first glimpse of mortality surfaced and prompted exploration into what was durable, something gentle that could weather the disfigurement of time and hurt. All was captured in a net cast by graphite on paper or in the language of colour.

 

 After leaving High School, Jessica briefly studied Furniture Design as a means to find a commercial application for her artistic skills.

 

 However, this career choice was not able to provide expression to the intensely personal and private world that Jessica inhabited. It was then that Jessica enrolled for a course in Illustration and at last she found her ‘natural’ voice.

A period of exploration followed where childhood characters were reanimated and assumed meaning and the storehouse of the self, of ideas, feelings, experiences and imaginative creations were carefully catalogued and worked into something that was uniquely her own. Animals, old portraits, fears, phobias and fantasy play out in remarkable relationships that maintain a consistent theme. Her work captures that brief yet treasured feeling of ‘sabi’, a Japanese word used in conjunction with Haiku that translates as a beauty tinged with sadness.