Davina Jackson is a figurative artist based in London where she currently works from a studio at Kingsgate workshops. She graduated  with a masters from the Royal Academy Schools where she won the Gold Medal for painting . Her interests have remained in the theatrical and psychological use of space and a search for poetic simplicity. She continues to develop themes of human relationships and emotional states, finding and articulating the essence of an intimate moment or experience through the simplification of forms ,mark making and painterly gestures .The figures, real bodies or abstracted, sometimes translucent and ephemeral, shift between spacial planes and yet at the same time, remain sculptural and monumental, portraying fragments of memory that lead one into a world that, in Gaston Bachelard's words, create "an intensity of being evolving in a vast perspective of intimate immensity". She has always been inspired by poetry, mythological and theatrical subjects, storytelling and exploring the inner world of the child. Her recent solo show at The Pontone Gallery in London was an exhibition of works exploring the fate of humanity through different interpretations of allegorical Greek Myths.

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She paints mainly in oils but, over lockdown, has worked much more with water based mediums and has enjoyed the immediacy of  exploring ideas on a smaller scale, producing a large collection of works predominantly on paper. Whilst the constraints of lockdown were incredibly challenging, managing three children at home and juggling the need to focus on her own art, the limitations have actually opened up new freedoms in her work and allowed for an unpressurised space to play. Davina continues to experiment with new mediums and surfaces and discovering new materials is an important part of her process, allowing accidents to happen and inform the direction of her work in a more instinctive way. She enjoys the physical dimension of painting and builds up layers that can take months to finish, allowing the work to evolve over time, but she can equally spend all day making very quick drawings which help her explore her ideas and which in turn, suggest and reveal new subject matter .

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'So Jackson is Jackson still. Here is no lightening transformation, but rather, as should be the case with all the true artists, a gradual instinctive evolution. The focus shifts, the emphasis changes, the atmosphere lightens or darkens, but the vision remains the same." John Russell Taylor, art critic at the Times and author of numerous books on art.