Jamie has been working actively in ceramic again for the past decade, the material he originally trained in during his early school years which allows him to work through successive additions and effacements. Jamie draws on large smooth plates of wet clay, by reacting to draw lines and create forms using both his hands, fingers, and a large needle to mark shapes as he etches incisions, scratches, or stipples, which he then quickly scrapes or smooths out, in order to start again. He uses and mixes a vast range of bright, often acidic and highly contrasting glaze colours which are layered upon one another through successive firings, each firing putting them at risk and finally saturating them in vibrant colours.
On these ceramic plates, the imagery of Jamie’s automatic drawings of the interior and exterior of his figurative art (heads, guts, organs), real matrices of his whole body of work, have been replaced by more slender, ethereal signs. From these mind maps, it is often the image of a flower that emerges, the scrollwork, fluid lines suggesting a head mounted on a graceful body.
For Jamie, this is Georges Bataille’s flower, an idealised and therefore misleading form, the medium for a symbolic projection of the idea of beauty, born, however, of compost. An image of impermanence and fragility, it can also be seen as a vacillating body.