Artist Biography

Jedediah Gainer (b.1981) is a British born contemporary painter, living and working in West Sussex, England. Educated in England and Chile, and having journeyed and experienced South and Central America, Europe and the Far East, he has slowly developed and acquired an interest in the way art is used to promote, assist, and affirm, supernatural and religious beliefs, in different cultures. 

Jedediah is especially interested in the way art can be used to psychologically warp perception, allowing for the visual formulation and affirming, of new worlds, and spirits. This inquisitive interest into the devotional communicative role art can perform, is what Jedediah endeavors to investigate. Subjectively, in his drawings and paintings, he attempts to unveil and portray the ancient ritual, concealed in the contemporary operation of formulating and fixing visions. 

Academically trained, Jedediah first attended Eastbourne College of Arts & Technology, procuring with distinction a BTEC National Diploma in General Art and Design, having specialized in fine art painting. Following this accomplishment, he went on to advance his studies at the Kent Institute of Art & Design, graduating with a Bachelor of Arts, Honours Degree, in Fine Art. While in his second year as an undergraduate at the Kent Institute, Jedediah opted to participate in an international exchange program, and was subsequently awarded a bursary, to attend, the Instituto Profesional de Arte y Comunicación Arcos, in Santiago de Chile. There he studied experimental photography, and video theory. After successfully completing his undergraduate degree, Jedediah undertook and consequently was awarded, a Masters Degree in Fine Art, from Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, University of Arts London.

As an exhibiting visual artist, Jedediah has had artwork selected and displayed in numerous group shows, and been represented in three national touring exhibitions. He has also produced a solo site-specific instillation. Most recently he was short-listed for the Jerwood Drawing Prize, and subsequently included in the accompanying national tour, which visited the Jerwood Space, London, the Summerfield Gallery, Cheltenham, Winchester Discovery Center, Winchester, Bury St Edmunds Art Gallery, Bury St Edmunds, and the DLI Museum & Durham Art Gallery, Durham. His work is held in an academic collection, and a number of private collections, within the United Kingdom.

Currently, Jedediah is composing a new series of paintings. Conceptually the series explores the realization of spirits, and the psychophysical affirming of the supernatural world, threw the application of pictograms and ideograms. Theses cerebral conditioning symbolic depictions, are tasked to educate and instill, metaphysical beliefs, and impart sacred supernatural knowledge. Notionally the series also unveils and explores the sanctimonious ceremonial performance, of immortalizing and bridging, physical and spiritual realities, threw the physicality of manipulated visual phenomena. Inspiration for this new body of work, stems from a research trip to the Capuchin catacombs of Palermo, Sicily. There he studied the facial expressions, and theatrical decoration, of individual degenerating mummified cadavers. 

Artist Statement

Fixing Memories, Mexico City and Teotihuacán Series

While engaged in the process of creating art, I consider myself to be absorbed in a ritually rich, ancient spiritual activity concerned with the conjuring and visual fixing of conscious experiences, and there connected emotional imprints. The objective of my artistic practice is not to directly focus on representing the experiences, or connected emotions, but is instead to focus on visually creating an illustrational representation of the mentally recalled memories, and the ritualistic qualities involved in the process of fixing the memories down.

Memories made up of experienced visions and emotions, are by nature abstracted over time, due to other memories corrupting and distorting the original autonomy of the actual events past reality. This slow transformation of the original mental imprint, morphs the memory into a representation of a memory, without a discernible non-fictional past reality.

When I’m visually fixing down mentally recalled memories, I always choose to close my eyes, while I execute the depositing and correlating of the marks. The reason why I intentionally choose to follow this rule, is to be able to visually reference and illustrate more accurately the mental imprints, of the memories. This prevents corruption from external sources distorting the mental imprints, and also allows the qualities associated with the process of fixing the memories to be visually displayed. Aesthetics resulting from this process visually display the abstract dimension embodied in the constructs of the recalled memories, mental imprints.

The differing degrees and amounts of abstraction visibly interlaced in my works, symbolizes, a transcendental visual discernment to the psycho altered thinking faculties, of the creators of the earliest known, hand rendered pictorial recordings. These first pictorial recordings were generated as pictographs and petroglyths, and produced during the upper Paleolithic period by tribal shamans. Paleolithic shamans used to fix arrangements of abstract marks onto the surfaces of sacred rocks and portal caves, after experiencing ritual trances, and self-induced hallucinations, to record and share their spirit journeys, and depict their hallucinated visions. Within my own works, I attempt to provide a realm for the generation of imaginative metaphysical thoughts, by intentionally eliciting a sensation, that in the pictorial narrative an element is absent. To achieve this attribute, I sever the unity of the components and depict minimal detail, fracturing the coherency of information.

The recalled memories I try to illustrate, are all connected to religious places that I have experienced first hand. Religiously important in different ways, beliefs, and functions, these places or items present within them, were designed and created with deliberate intention to register an emotional spiritual response on the individual, that would be mentally registered and fixed, so never forgotten. 

2011 Jedediah Gainer