Studio Visit Text with Matthew Price curator and writer and Head of Anomie Publishing, London 2021             In the introduction to her acclaimed 2016 book Flâneuse – Women Walk the City in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice and London, Dr Lauren Elkin discusses ‘the key problem at the heart of the urban experience: are we individuals, or are we part of the crowd? Do we want to stand out, or blend in? […] How do we – no matter what our gender – want to be seen in public? Do we want to attract or escape the gaze? Be independent and invisible? Remarkable or unremarked-upon?’ Such questions are just some of many integral to the practice of Manchester and London-based artist Jasmir Creed – a graduate of Wimbledon College of Art who is currently undertaking a PhD at the Slade School of Fine Art in London.

 

In Creed’s solo exhibition Dystopolis at Victoria Gallery and Museum at the University of Liverpool (2018–19), crowds were a prominent motif, often comprising anonymous figures traversing urban spaces. In Wanderers (2016) monochrome black figures walk across a white square or concourse like silhouettes, their matchstick-like legs and abbreviated forms echoing, with postmodern, post-industrial hindsight, the everyday crowd scenes of L.S. Lowry (1887–1976). (Lowry’s depictions of Salford in Greater Manchester have a particular resonance in terms of Creed’s own experiences of living in the Manchester area.) In this oil painting, the figures walk to and fro with an almost existential malaise – their destinations and purposes unknown, a sense of futility fostered by the homogenising effect of the shadowy monochrome. Anybody who has ever been part of the monotonous twice-daily rush-hour surge of workers and commuters on public transport on a cold, grey, wet British day will instantly know this disheartening sense of just being a cog in the machine, a rat in the race, another brick in the wall.

 

In other works from this exhibition, groups of pedestrians can variously be seen on escalators, crossing roads, walking along the pavement in front of shops and milling about in clusters in unspecified locations. These people are regularly captured unawares, as if viewed from vantage points high above, or through security cameras – the use of various shades of grey an overt reference to surveillance footage. If Creed is a flâneuse, then this image suggests she – or the viewer – is also a voyeuse, that we are watching others without them necessarily knowing that they are being watched. The surreptitious atmosphere of these scenes is enhanced by the curious angles and architectural configurations that often frame, or intervene in, Creed’s paintings and drawings.

 

In To Observe (2017), the viewer is literally up in the rafters with two pigeons for company, looking down through a curious opening at the figures in the street below. A flash of iridescent green neck feathers and a pair of pink feet provide colour highlights to an otherwise grisaille palette. The opening through which the viewer looks out is evocative of an idiosyncratic piece of industrial engineering – we are very much hidden away, perched behind the scenes of the urbanism that we survey. In contrast to those in Wanderers, the figures in this painting reveal more individuality, the physical traits and gaits of the pedestrians caught with considerable aplomb by Creed, emerging out of, or receding into, the loosely abstract painterly language.

 

In a work such as Fragmentation (2017), Creed’s desire to capture the experience of being swept up in an urban crowd takes a further step into abstraction, splicing together myriad fragments of images of pedestrians from different angles. The space reads almost coherently, but as if viewed in a smashed mirror or kaleidoscope, with bold, black shards punctuating the picture plane. The hustle and bustle of busy city streets is evident here, people walking across the paths of others as they contend with pavements, roads, traffic and the buildings, signage and street furniture that fill our eyelines at such moments. It can seem overwhelming, oppressive or intimidating, especially for young children and the elderly, those with physical disabilities or people unused to city life.

 

The contrast between the city and the countryside, between the man-made and the natural world, is explored in a number of Creed’s works of this time, a painting such as Through the Foliage (2017) presenting another aerial view of people below, but this time the grey urban scene is viewed through a striking pink, green and blue floral border. The two modes are intentionally jarring, as if forced together or one cut out of the other. Writing about Creed’s works in the catalogue for the Dystopolis exhibition, Elkin asserts: ‘Working mostly from photographs, and in part from her walks through cities like London, Manchester and now Liverpool, Creed is attuned to the surrealist juxtapositions the city throws in our paths.’ In several works, of which Naturopen and Pastoralux (both 2017) are examples, plants, flowers, foliage and undergrowth threaten to block out or reclaim the urban spaces below, spreading like the titular giant plant species of John Wyndham’s 1951 novel The Day of the Triffids. Creed’s giant-scale plants and flowers take on an architectural presence in these works, as if to propose a fantastical, organic form of urbanism to challenge the straight edges and angles usually experienced in a modern city.

 

Creed’s urban scenes speak of how the individual can lose their identity to the crowd in packed spaces such as train stations and streets, and how the body – our physical existence – can be reduced to just a few small, blurred brushstrokes. Everything we are, the complexity of our lives and personalities, can be reduced by the social, political and economic structures to an infinitesimal statistic, bringing to mind the character Number 6’s famous declaration ‘I am not a number!’ in the final episode of the 1960s cult British television series The Prisoner. It is perhaps not surprising, then, that some of Creed’s works depict scenes of uprisings and civil unrest, the painting Protest (2017) a dark and disorienting depiction of two mirrors or lenses reflecting a crowd in which at least one figure carries a banner of a woman’s face within a headscarf. This is an example of when a group can take ownership of itself. The implication of the painting is not only that when people come together of their own accord and for a shared purpose they can be more powerful as a group than as individuals, but conversely that the protestors are being monitored by some unspecified agency: when a group mobilises against the system or aspects of it, those in power usually do their utmost to clamp down on it as quickly as possible.

 

Similarly, the ink drawing Unity (2020) depicts a figure standing defiantly and triumphantly on an empty plinth, a sea of banners around the base of the monument evocative of the scenes from the recent toppling of public sculptures of historical British figures associated with slave ownership and the slave trade. While direct action to destroy artworks in civic spaces such as this divided public opinion, it is both interesting and significant that public art can be a conduit through which important subjects come to mass media attention. By extension, Creed’s drawing becomes part of this cultural and political debate. At a time in which Britain is grappling with its colonial past and the legacies of this both in British society and throughout the Commonwealth today, Creed’s exploration of people’s interactions with urban spaces raises questions about conformity and crime, democracy and dissent, citizenship and anomie, continuity and change. On a fundamental level, it asks who the British public are today, and what their relationship is with the institutions that represent them.

 

That issues of identity and of community in British cities today are central to Creed’s practice is reinforced in a work such as Dislocation (2020), in which a woman wearing traditional Arabian or African clothing stands in profile against a backdrop of Trafalgar Square at dusk, Nelson’s Column prominent against a cloudy, sickly yellow sky. Her outfit is colourful and highly patterned, in stark contrast to the grey scene behind. Her eyes look downwards, suggesting introspection, tiredness or that she is feeling forlorn. The title, along with the juxtaposition between the woman and the city, leads us to suspect that she feels cut off from her cultural roots or from her community. What do centuries-old British military victories mean to someone who has migrated to Britain from a very different culture, or, in fact, to anybody walking through central London today? Perhaps this woman left a warzone or oppression in another country, coming to Britain for safety or asylum. With stories of the experiences of immigrants fleeing countries such as Syria and Afghanistan regularly in the news, in this painting Creed is perhaps inviting consideration of the lives and circumstances of those who find themselves in Britain without a home to return to. Alternatively, perhaps this woman has lived in London for many years or was born in Britain, choosing to represent her cultural heritage through her choice of clothing. Either way, she seems disconnected, different, somehow.

 

Loneliness, detachment and alienation are clearly significant themes in Creed’s works, and these are closely connected to ideas of disenfranchisement and disempowerment – of being cut off from whatever a particular person or group might need to flourish and succeed in life, whether that be money, education, stability, documents, career opportunities, purpose, friendship, family or community, or some combination thereof. That the possible narratives Creed creates in her works can offer complex insights into multicultural Britain today are further presented in a work such as Coronight (2020), in which a group of young women – perhaps Muslims among them – stand on the edge of a large empty square that is surrounded by golden architecture under a dark, pink sky. The viewer might interpret the scene on first impression as one of religious pilgrimage in South Asia or the Middle East, though closer inspection reveals that the building is actually the Piece Hall in Halifax – once the site of a textiles factory, now a museum. Collaging in the small groups of women (all wearing Covid-19 masks), Creed raises interesting questions about the ongoing relationship between the textiles industries in Britain and South Asia, production and consumption, wealth and poverty, colonialism and the post-colonial condition.

 

In the painting Other Daughter (2021) an impressive building in a traditional Indian style dominates a brooding dark blue and pink sky. Two elderly figures in Sikh clothing walk away from the building towards the picture plane, suggesting that it is a gurdwara – a holy building where Sikhs gather for worship, meditation and community work. It is well known to many in the Sikh community as the largest Sikh temple outside India, and is the Sri Guru Singh Sabha Gurdwara in Southall, West London, which opened in 2003. In the foreground of the painting, a young woman in a red sari stands with her arms by her sides, a sombre expression on her face. Presumably she is the ‘other daughter’ referenced in the painting’s title, perhaps the daughter or granddaughter of the elderly couple nearby. While the whole scene is in colour, the elderly couple are painted in black and white, enhancing the sense of collaging and suggesting a distance in time as well as in space. What the exact narrative might be – the story behind the scene – is left ambiguous, though it is charged with family drama, intergenerational intrigue.

 

Creed herself has family connections to Sikhism, and has visited the gurdwara depicted, describing the experience in a presentation for Manchester School of Art’s Bunker Talks series as being ‘as though I was in a separate world. Even though it is placed on the same streets, it feels apart from England but together at the same time. The strong gold of the dome feels otherworldly when viewed from a distance […] amongst the conventional houses and buildings.’ The young woman in the painting – perhaps a second, third or even fourth generation British citizen – could be said to represent young British Asian women today living with two or more cultural traditions, hybrid identities. Creed’s painting is literally an evocation of multicultural Britain and the contemporary transcultural, inviting questions about integration and alienation, assimilation and diversity, enculturation and difference as time moves on.

 

Creed’s strategies of distortion, fragmentation, collage, montage, juxtaposition and disruption are perhaps all demonstrated in a painting such as InterWorlds (2021), a South Asian woman in bright, colourful clothing emerging from a dizzying, almost Cubist-like backdrop of urban vignettes. It could be a city almost anywhere in the world, and the woman could likewise be from almost anywhere – New York, London, Delhi, Tokyo. The title suggests, though, that there is a clashing of cultures here, that this is an image of worlds colliding, and that the woman is caught between them. Creed’s cityscapes are perhaps heterotopias – partly imagined, heterogeneous places neither dystopian nor utopian; they are worlds within worlds. To return to Elkin’s questions at the start of this essay: ‘are we individuals, or are we part of the crowd? Do we want to stand out, or blend in?’ These are questions that could well be posed to the woman in this painting, and her answers would undoubtedly reveal much about both her personal situation and the wider paradigm.

 

As a British South Asian artist, Creed is similarly well placed to bring new perspectives both on the transcultural experience in multicultural Britain today and to the field of contemporary British painting. Her practice is one that that promises to make a significant contribution to defining what British society, especially as manifested through its major cities, is today – what British identity and womanhood might be in a post-industrial, largely post-colonial, postmodern world, and what roles people from transcultural backgrounds have to play in shaping it.

 

 

 

 

Ineffable City by Dr Lauren Elkin  2018

Featured in Jasmir Creed: Dystopolis Victoria Gallery and Museum, University of Liverpool Exhibition of Paintings 16 November 2018- 20 April 2019, catalogue

Translation is always a form of distortion, and what we see, looking at one of Jasmir Creed’s canvases, is a kind of translation, of the city rendered through the artist’s perceptive gaze, and her creative body. Creed’s city will not be your city, or my city, but a very personal one, whose architecture and graffiti and swells of people register on the canvas in her own unique visual patois.

Working mostly from photographs, and in part from her walks through cities like London, Manchester, and now Liverpool, Creed is attuned to the surrealist juxtapositions the city throws in our paths – much like the painter Dexter Dalwood, whose hyperreal interiors are a clear influence here. She lives and works amidst the neoclassical, industrial cityscape of Manchester, where she finds herself enjoyably lost in the crowd, left alone to attune herself to the noises of the city, or to the soundtrack on her headphones as she walks. What might the people around her be thinking as she passes them? How does this generate a psychic charge to a given street? Creed is aiming for fidelity to that psychogeography, while creating her own visual world that owes no debt of representation to the original.

I love the way her work kettles the crowd in the geometry of the city, as in Whirlpool, or in the radiant impasto of Naturopen, which situates a drab, colourless group of people crowded into a bland beige space covered over or interrupted by a bright lily pond which has about it the keen artificiality of mall horticulture. Is this Liverpool One, a place where you can walk for hours without seeing the sky, or without knowing for sure if what is above your head is sky, sky perceived through window, or ceiling made to look like sky? Or some ineffable city, a translation of our own, one we need Creed to make visible to us? Creed picks up on the urban paradoxes of Liverpool and allows the viewer to enter them herself, in a gesture that both distorts and makes legible the habitats that we urgently need to see afresh, if we are to understand ourselves at all.

Untrammelled Elements: Reflections on the Work of Jasmir Creed by Professor Graeme Gilloch 2018             Featured in Jasmir Creed: Dystopolis Victoria Gallery and Museum, University of Liverpool Exhibition of Paintings 16 November 2018- 20 April 2019, catalogue 

“Great cities – whose incomparably sustaining and reassuring power encloses those at work within them in an internal truce [Burgfrieden] and lifts from them, with the view of the horizon, awareness of the ever-vigilant elemental forces – are seen to be breached at all points by the invading countryside. Not by the landscape, but by what is bitterest in untrammelled nature: ploughed land, highways, night sky that the veil of vibrant redness no longer conceals. The insecurity of even the busy areas puts the city dweller in the opaque and truly dreadful situation in which he must assimilate, along with isolated monstrosities from the open country, the abortions of urban architectonics” (Walter Benjamin in Selected Writings Volume 1 1913-1926, Cambridge MA: Harvard UP, 1996, p. 454).        

“Strength lies in improvisation. All the decisive blows are struck left handed” (Walter Benjamin ibid p. 447)

 

Arachne’s City

These two aphorisms from Walter Benjamin’s famous1926 One-Way Street [Einbahnstrasse] collection arguably capture much of motivating source and guiding spirit of Jasmir Creed’s images, works that are principally and profoundly concerned with our uncanny experience of the modern metropolitan environment. The first excerpt – written, it should be noted, with a keen sense of irony – alerts us to the interpenetration and cross-contamination of ‘first’ and ‘second’ nature, of natural ecosystems and human-made technosystems, to those violent irruptions and intrusions of the one within and into the other, and, most importantly, to their concomitant and mutual despoliation and ruination. Moreover, it also highlights that intense disquiet and desolation which attends those who inhabit such blighted cityscapes and landscapes, those who must call such unheimlich settings their home. The second quotation – part of Benjamin’s insistence upon the efficacy of indirection and digress, of the unforeseen and the unintentional – is due reminder never to underestimate the potential of the seemingly obtuse or gauche. Not that Jasmir’s images are gauche; far from it, it is the Italian – not the French – that I have in mind here: these pictures are sinister. They disturb us; they disquiet us; they disorient our perceptions and destabilize our world. They are blows struck upon the tired taken-for-grantedness of mundane spaces and lives more ordinary; and they are decisive ones at that.               

Vividly envisioning “the abortions of urban architectonics” and the faceless crowds who hasten past, through, across, along and within them, Urban Forests (The Gallery, Delta House Studios, London, January 2017) was my first encounter with Jasmir’s unsettling artworks. At first, I was struck most forcefully by the sombre blue-black chiaroscuro of the large ink-on-paper pieces, with their imagining and juxtapositioning of dark, looming architectural forms and of the fine filigree of latticework (Watchers [2016] Flow [2016]). This is the contemporary neo-noir city as shadowscape. Steel Webs (2016) is exemplary and for me the stand-out piece. Here it is not so much the brute inertia of stone and concrete edifices that contrasts with the spare aerial tracery of steel and glass, but rather the human populace as a murky mass lurking, loitering below – anonymous, impersonal, funereal in attire, like a crowd that has just arrived from some nightmarish Edvard Munch painting, as if all the grotesque figures and caricatures from Ludwig Kirchner’s Expressionist canvases were now newly assembled here as part of some nefarious, clandestine gathering. One can almost hear their whisperings and murmurings, the soft rhythms of their footfall, the garbled announcements relayed over some hidden tannoy system. Sound itself is as muted, as blurred as the figures. But there is nothing indistinct about the mood, the pervasive air of this ominous picture: it is pervaded by an unnamed, unspoken fear.

             

Jasmir is gives her works seemingly simple titles, but these are also highly suggestive: Steel Webs in particular evokes one of her favourite figures, that of the spider, one of nature’s most ingenious and intricate architects. The apparent fragility and delicacy of the web should not distract us from its principle purpose: it is a lethal trap for the unwary, a killing machine. And make no mistake: this is an image of menace and threat. One wonders: so where exactly is the monstrous spider that has spun these webs and are those human shadows down below its prey, or merely what is left of them, human husks, a crowd of carrion?   

In imagining the labyrinthine qualities of contemporary cities, the figure of Ariadne is often invoked by cultural critics (Benjamin foremost among them): she is the cunning flaneuse who acts as our guide, leading us through the disorienting maze and safely out into the light. She is the personification of redemption. Jasmir draws on another, much more malign and malevolent mythological figure: not Ariadne but Arachne, the weaver, the daughter of a dyer in purple, the woman who, as punishment for her hubris, is transformed into a spider by Athena, goddess of wisdom. It is Arachne who patiently awaits us in this urban forest; or perhaps we sit with her, we become her even, high up in her metallic mesh with eyes trained upon those beneath, watching and waiting, biding the time. Arachne is a figure of patient predation. 

Urban Forests: the very title presents us with the implosion of the natural world and the built environment. And they are home not only to our primal arachnid fears, but to the hypermodern metropolitan malaise of alienation, anonymity, dislocation, de-personalization, isolation, paranoia and acrophobia. The Fall (2015) appears to depict a whirling figure who has simply had enough and now tumbles headlong down into the vanishing point of the picture between two twisting skyscrapers. This is part of another monochromatic series of pen and / charcoal on paper images which simultaneously resemble aerial views of some sprawling, fractured city spread out below (Interweave [2015]) and provoke a dizzying sense of the vertiginous. Circular patterns and spiralling, swirling forms seem to produce a vortex at the centre of these pictures towards which one is irresistibly drawn by centripetal forces, into which one disappears without trace (Funnelscape [2015], Mirage [2015]). 

Working from cut-outs and photomontage compositions, Jasmir’s paintings also envision the sinister cityscape by means of broken planes and panels, jagged and irregular, with polymorphous forms inserted, intruded, abutted, conjoined, imploded into and within them. Part monochromatic, part a pale wash (sometimes acrylic, sometimes oils) of washed-out colour (oranges, reds, blues), these are not so much shards or fragments – such terms suggest something fragile like the tesserae of a mosaic or sharp like glass splinters – as crude chunks, lumps, blocks or boulders of buildings, masonry, railway tracks, roadways, steps, pavements, root systems, walkways, all peopled by yet more faceless pedestrians crossing back and forth (Flood [2016], Swarm [2016], Dystoban [2016], Structures and Maps [2015], Entrancement [2016]). It is as if the entire city has been blasted apart and these are the left-overs, the remnants and the rubble, now compacted together into rough and incongruous composites, sites of dereliction and decay inhabited by sleepwalkers. For Jasmir, the task of the artist is to rework the waste and waste-lands of the city, to recognise and reconfigure the ruinscape, and to represent the lost souls who roam it. We are forlorn, forgotten and forgetful forest dwellers. 

 

‘Isolated Monstrosities’

 

Jasmir’s new show Dystopolis rekindles her preoccupation with the urban uncanny through reiterating and rejigging earlier motifs, adding new and original elements to her visual vocabulary, injecting fresh colours and tones, broadening the scope and scale of  paper and canvas. In so doing, she moves back and forth between the apparently generic cityscape imagined in Urban Forests (essentially a composite of Manchester and London) and a particular and identifiable one – indeed, the one that is hosting her exhibition: Liverpool.

Sometimes Lost (2018), for example, presents us once again with Jasmir’s favourite theme – the metropolitan crowd – but with a Liverpudlian inflection. Here they walk towards and away from the viewer, into and out of the canvas, while above them soars not the spidery creations of Steel Webs but rather a curious central metallic column, ice-blue and silver grey, which splays out into what could be supporting arches and vaults of some colossal edifice or even, more prosaically, some kind of watertower. This painting is a trompe d’oeil. Turned upside down, the architectural centrepiece is immediately revealed and recognised as an image of the Liverpool’s famous Metropolitan Cathedral, the affectionately termed ‘wigwam’.

Set against a fiery yellow-orange background and framed by the black silhouettes of industrial towers and oil burners, the outline of this iconic building is also evident in the grey-white central panel of Vessel (2018). Pedestrians here seem to be ascending the Cathedral’s central tower, the gridwork of paving stones suggesting both steps to be climbed and an exterior of manifold glass panes.     

Altar Island (2018) takes us down to the city’s waterfront and presents us with a playful double spatial reversal. On the far side of the Albert Dock, the architecture of the city is turned upside down as it is reflected a pale yellowy orange in the murky Merseyside waters. The characteristically monochromatic panel comprising the foreground features a few faceless figures to the left apparently attending to various stone features occupying the centre and right of the canvas: an altar of some kind, some broken statuary, a piece of masonry. In a second inversion, Jasmir has taken these elements from within the Metropolitan Cathedral and strewn them on the dockside, turning the building inside out so to speak. It is not just ‘some times’ that are ‘lost’ in these works, but some spaces too – spaces out of place, displaced, loci gone walkabout, somewhere now elsewhere.

      

True, Jasmir’s new works stay loyal to her tried and tested montage technique such that the canvas appears transformed into a broken windowpane. Moreover, the anonymous, agitated urban crowd drained of colour remains her leitmotif. These pedestrians appear either as a smeary blur of soft grey tones as if seen through fine, misty drizzle (Fragmentation, 2017) or, occasionally, as black-clad figures scurrying hither and thither (Urban Flux, 2017). But something decisive has changed: her passers-by now appear as if surrounded, encircled, besieged by something truly monstrous, overwhelming, unstoppable, irresistible, remorseless, unfathomable: by untrammelled Nature. We are no longer lost in some vast ‘urban forest’ but rather losing ground to the encroachments of another, more forceful and formidable flora altogether: giant stems, leaves, blooms, lily pads and root systems which Baudelaire most assuredly did not have in mind when he named his cycle of poems Les fleurs du mal but for which the designation ‘the flowers of evil’ seems most apt. In a series of works from 2017, among them Through the Foliage, Fauna Mist, Pastoralax, Naturban, Dystopiature, City Pads, Jasmir presents us with the collision of two highly invasive species, a violent coming together captured in the linguistic play and neologisms of the titles themselves. And in this clash of worlds, the humans are not faring well. By nesting the fragments of the cityscape within these blooming, twisting, writhing, proliferating vegetal masses, Jasmir ensures a two-fold effect: on the one hand, it creates the sense of the city being swallowed up, or suffocated, or swamped by some superabundant plant-life; on the other, it positions the viewer of the image in amongst the foliage itself. We are peering through the gargantuan leaves, peeking between the behemothic blooms. We are witnesses to the revenge of Nature, to the coming of the triffids, from their vantage point. The observer of these scenes is no longer an arachnid ensconced high up in the canopy but hidden down amongst the undergrowth turned overgrowth, a praying mantis, stealthy, silent. We are closing in upon the humans. They are the ones who exist now only as ‘isolated monstrosities’. And we spy on them no longer through a cracked window, but through the fractures in the concrete wrought by the mute but inexorable power of relentless root systems.

 

What is perhaps most striking about these recent works is Jasmir’s unexpected use of colour: the monochromism of the urban fragments is now intensified by the bright hues of the vegetation which now engulf them: sunset reds and oranges, shades of crimson and violet, all manner of vegetal greens and yellows. For, rest assured, in experimenting with a new palette for these images, she has not abandoned her fundamental preternatural tone and mood. Far from it: the vivid colours on show here serve to compound rather than diminish the sinister qualities of the flora. The spider may be the stuff of our nightmares, but how much more unnerving this bizarre profusion and confusion of the seemingly innocent. These flowers are a bouquet presented left handed. That is how Nature strikes its blows.          

 

The garish garlands serve to emphasise the sense of enclosure and entrapment of the central figure. This in turn replays and gives fresh inflection to another of Jasmir’s earlier motifs: the vortex. And here one comes upon two works which seem to suggest a fresh point of departure for her work – a ‘new sensibility’ would be an exaggeration; let us call it, a more playful, more optimistic inflection. In Whirlpool (2018) a spiral staircase or stairwell leads down into a fragment of a swimming pool filled with swimmers and bathers suitably attired in bright summer hues. Yes, there is the vertiginous and the acrophobic, but the fall here is not into nothingness and the void but rather a dive into water. A curious image, but a softer landing. And then there is Pool of Life (2018), a painting inspired by a dream recounted by the Swiss analytical psychologist Carl Jung. Here there is another aquatic central panel but this time it resembles not so much a populated lido as a humble puddle in a city street, the lingering remainder and reminder of the rains which fall torrentially upon the crowds depicted to the right. It is a simple thing to be sure, but its glassy waters reflect the now cloudless blue sky above. It is as if a piece of the heavens had fallen to earth. A puddle, a pool of life, a living pool; Liverpool, Liverpudlian. Perhaps this city has brought a fleeting fragment of the celestial to brighten Jasmir’s sinister cities. Perhaps, as the water-diviner of dystopolis, she has found us a wishing well.