In Conversation With: Jazmyn Maher
Written by Emily Wigham
Stevenage-born Jazmyn Maher, graduate of Wimbledon College of Art and part-time art teacher, is an emerging artist whose work is unlike any you may have seen before. Concentrating on drawing, etching and printmaking, Jazmyn uses a series of influences like Dante’s Inferno and memories of childhood Sunday Services to create raw, provocative art works that stare into the very depth of human darkness. I spoke with Jazmyn over Zoom, and got her talking about her works, wanting to understand the woman behind the drawings, yet her bright demeanour is far from the ominous nature of her art.
“I studied fine art painting at Wimbledon because so many of the artists I looked up to were painters, but I soon realised that I’m just terrible at it. I went to the pub with one of my tutors a few years ago and he told me, ‘I took you on because you can draw and print, and I didn’t want to lose you even though you were really shit at painting’”.
We both had a good long laugh at this but considering the talent she shows in her chosen medium it’s hard to imagine she’s really that bad. Either way, the school convinced her to continue on in her degree, encouraging her to use the amenities at her disposal in the print department, rather than drop out.
“I was really close to the printmaking technician, so I got into printmaking, etching and intaglio style. I was so fortunate because Wimbledon was quite a small school, so all the tutors kind of knew me. I had the fortunate circumstance of having the painting tutors, as well as the printmaking technician, creating a well-rounded education”.
For anyone who isn’t aware, which I wasn’t before this interview, intaglio is a print making technique where ink is held in the crevices of an image carved into a piece of metal – anyway, lesson over. Jazmyn got on so well in Wimbledon that they gave her a year’s free studio space, a membership which she kept up on and off until the pandemic. However, talent like hers must spring from somewhere, so I asked her briefly about her younger years and where her love of art stemmed from.
“My family are all musicians, they love music. My brothers can play about 10 instruments each, but it was too much pressure. I thought I wouldn’t be as good as them, so I wanted to have my own trait. I also had some wicked teachers at my school, John Henry, and did a BTEC in art there. They really allowed me to come out of my shell and express myself, it was a great place to breath”.
She even tells a funny anecdote about a piece of art she created in school, where she stuck bacon in PVA glue: “I was trying to be like, oh I’m going to make art no one has ever made before”.
She may not be using meat to create art anymore, still she continues to imbibe visceral imagery into everything she does; hers is a very distinct style. So, while it may have begun using meat, Jazmyn, now a vegetarian, clarifies when she really started making the art she is now known for.
“It was probably when I ditched painting. I was so lost trying to paint at uni and really didn’t like the medium. I remember doing a few one-off prints in the print studio and taking it up to my tutor. I was so scared because he was really respected in the painting community, and I thought he’d hate it.
“It was of a woman and she sat there with her legs apart, and she was bleeding from her vagina, and there's loads things around her head, like half-beast-half-men flying around talking to her. He said to me, ‘I love it, but it's domesticated’. I had this wild thing going on, where beasts meet humans, and you can tell there's this female sadness there, but then I put her in a tiny little box in the form of an etching. And he was like, just go mad with it. And then that's when I really started to come into my own”.
One such example of this is her current project, which has been ongoing for 2 years: a 20-foot-long drawing, inspired by Dante’s Inferno. The poem is known for its powerful and extremely sinister way of portraying hell and its nine rings – so I could only imagine the rich inspiration one could draw from it. But what brought Jazmyn to its fiery depths?
“I was going through a pretty shit time in my life, and I thought, what can I do? I had so much rage about my job and life in general, and I think rage attracts rage. Then I started reading the Inferno and thought, this is so good. The poem is so long and so dense, and it's all in a kind of Old English, but I love just sitting there, translating it into drawings”
While I find this to be an incredible feat, her housemates weren’t so impressed, as Jazmyn often lugged the 20ft piece of liner paper into the front room while they were trying to watch The Office.
“I've become really attached to it. I don't think I could ever sell it. I feel like I birthed it with everything I’ve been through, and you can see the different stages through the style of drawing throughout. At the top, I'm very aggressive, which encapsulated a pretty bad year. Then you go further along and it's a bit smoother because I've calmed down. I'm taking it so slow because it's been a labor of love, and I'm too scared to let it go.”
Jazmyn likens the rage that facilitated her 20ft creation to the tormented artists she so admires: “I was really inspired by people like Louise Bourgeois and Francis
Bacon, all these sorts of like nitty gritty artists. But I also really love the comical side of people like Pettibon, making a dig at social constructs. I particularly love Goya’s series The Disasters of War. There's this one specific etching called Hunting for Teeth; I've actually got two teeth tattooed on me. Anyway, it's this woman and she's pulling the gold teeth from the mouth of a dead men. It’s set during the war, so she was trying to feed her family”.
HUNTING FOR TEETH
Jazmyn takes inspiration from this depiction of women and uses it in her own characters: “all the bodies in my art are unconventional, they're female but I don't give them hair. They all have big tummies and leaking boobs; you can't really place them. I’m just trying to push and reject beauty constructs. I don't want to dress like you tell me or make my tummy flat, it’s the narrative that people try to put on women that I’m fighting against”.
While women take center stage in much of her work, the pieces are extremely emotive, which Jazmyn credits to grief. After taking some time off due to loss in the pandemic, Jazmyn found art to be a place to express her feelings.
“I'm really influenced by grief. There is this one book that I genuinely love called Grief is the Thing with Feathers, by Max Porter. It's all about this big crow that comes down as a metaphor in the shape of death. A man, who has two young sons, just lost his wife and the crow is there to kind of usher things along. I read it when it first came out and then flipped through a few quotes from it again recently. I realized grief didn’t have to be a bad thing, so started putting that energy into my Inferno drawing. But yeah, for a good six months I wasn't creating. I was like, Man, this is so depressing, being 26 and realizing: these are my good years, I can’t get them back!”.
The pandemic has been and continues to be a source of strain on all our lives, but Jazmyn is right – you cannot reclaim these years later. There is no COVID refund strategy that tags an extra 18 months onto the end of your life just for having gone through it – you have to live now, although, sometimes just getting out of bed in the morning is enough. I’ve taken to watching Sex and the City for the first time and living vicariously through Carrie Bradshaw is definitely giving my life meaning. Jazmyn’s art is a world of its own, taking inspiration from the greats and delving into the furthest reaches of the human psyche.
Get lost in her universe by following her on Instagram @tynejazmyn.
