Jessica Jane Charleston

Jessica Jane Charleston’s works are rooted in drawing from life. Her practice - which encompasses painting, printmaking, poetry and sculpture - takes self-portraiture as its starting point, blending it with imagined imagery to explore domestic themes including identity, womanhood and motherhood.

Myths, folk tales, dreams and television programmes are all inspirations for the artist, and her work is characterised by a fluid, impactful drawing style. Featuring entwined, curvaceous figures often merging into animal forms, her compositions are rich in narrative and a sense of magic. Both theatrical and intimate, the works range in scale from palm-sized artist’s books to large-scale fabric and ink paintings which, in Jessica’s words, explore ‘the contrasting sides to a human being.’

Jessica graduated from The Royal Drawing School in 2017, and was awarded the Young Artist Award from the Royal Watercolour Society in 2020. She has exhibited her paintings extensively in the UK including with The Nunnery Gallery, Christies, London Art Fair, The Royal Academy of Arts Summer Exhibition, and Hastings Contemporary. In 2025 Jessica celebrated her first international solo exhibition in San Francisco, USA with CULT Aimee Friberg Gallery. She has been in residence at Dumfries House, Scotland, Moritz-Heyman in Pignano, Italy, and at Firstsite in Essex, England. Her work is in the permanent collections of the Dumfries House in Scotland, Moritz-Heyman in Italy, Stuart Hall Library, and HM King Charles in the UK. She lives and works in south east London.

We are proud to present new work by Jessica in our upcoming group exhibition And Other Animals. Contact us to request a catalogue.