James Ferguson-Rose (b. 1989, Yorkshire, UK) is an artist living and working in London, having completed an MA in Painting at the Royal College of Art in 2023. His work is held in private collections internationally, and has been exhibited across the UK - including the Laing Gallery (Newcastle), Cedric Bardawil (London), OHSH Projects (London), The Newbridge Project (Newcastle) and The Manchester Contemporary.
Ferguson-Rose’s paintings are a conglomerate of past, present and future experiences. Outside the studio, he walks and draws at the same time, to record and collect information in the landscape as it appears and disappears over the course of a journey. Drawings and memory absorb the features and qualities of time spent in a place. Back in the studio Ferguson-Rose makes paintings that reflect on both journey and place, finding tension between the relationship of the work to its source material - where specific features of a landscape may have to be lost in the studio process but later recur purely in a sense of ‘painting,’ - and the language of line, mark and plane. Each work, speaks of an experience of place over the reality of any specific site.
The tree lies prone with limbs frozen useless in the air,long haven given up the hope of a hand back up.
Still drawing, all of my body is in action to negotiate this moment,
I thread my legs into the branches to stay balanced while my hands clamour to record the grief of the terrain,
a body returned to earth,
a busy web of life and death co-existing without intervention.
The familiar axes of landscape are upended more than once while we are knotted together, briefly the king of limbs.
When am I?
This tussle comes to a close and the wooden spell breaks as my feet are benevolently returned to me, and to the yielding ground once more.
(James Ferguson Rose – Hampstead Heath 2023)