Juliette Blightman

Juliette Blightman is a British artist based in London.  Since the mid 2000s, Blightman has worked across painting, photography, film, drawing, performance, installation and text to produce a body of work that meticulously puts together the fragments of the everyday, and within that re-tell Blightman’s lived experiences. Through this her work nods at movements in literature and art (such as the Imagist poets) that have eschewed grand themes in favour of the minutia of what surrounds us; friends, family, travel, the details of interiors, the small observations that make up each day that passes. 

Portraiture, both of people and the spaces they inhabit is a unifying thread across her work, as is the technique of montage that conveys a fragmentary sense of experiencing the world. Blightman’s oeuvre is rooted within the poetics of everyday life but from within that space, the works gently interrogate questions around the physical and mental spaces that social structures have constructed for the gendered subject. Her work asks: what is it to be present in the world, and what traces do we leave for others around us?

Blightman’s practice tends towards the transient and the deliberately withheld or obscured. Yet this simply could be another way of saying that her work, rather aiming for timelessness, is located within time. Time does not stand still whilst looking at her work, instead it flows by; through the presence of plants and mirrors and other external objects deliberately placed by Blightman in her exhibitions. In some works, such as her prints that enlarge lo-fi images so that the process of zooming in and printing is visible, Blightman seems again to be drawing attention to the processes of time. Another strategy to root works within the passing of time is the gentle use of absurdity - the instruction to feed a fish and water a plant of an early installation.

Blightman has exhibited widely at a number of institutions both as a solo artist or in collaboration with other artists, including Lafayette Anticipations (2023), Haus am Waldsee (2023), Vleeshal (2021), Kölnischer Kunstverein (2020), Western Front, Vancouver (2018), Kunsthalle Bern (2016), South London Gallery (2016) and Badischer Kunstverein (2015). She is currently exhibiting in the group show ‘IN.SIGHT’ at Hamburger Kunsthalle until April 2025 and will show with the gallery at Independent in Spring 2025.