Jasmir Creed: Utopolis

Jasmir Creed paints images of urban alienation and the contemporary transcultural based on her journeys in urban environments. Creed depicts people in crowds, iconic buildings and sculptures alongside self-portraits and room interiors. The people depicted are from diverse communities and reflect her own identity as a British artist with South Asian roots.

Her paintings express how she experiences diverse cultural customs and multiple perspectives leading to fractured identities and cultural hybridity – for example, they show South Asian women’s dress and textile designs. The materiality of oil paint is used to construct space using areas of colour on the picture plane which can then be occupied by forms such as figures. Creed uses vivid colours in her expressionistic figurative paintings with montage influencing the painterly compositions.

The paintings usually contrast the psychological presence of anonymous people from different cultural backgrounds as well as self-portraits, in a relationship with environments that often include iconic references to British history such as Trafalgar Square, London. Some paintings show commuters on trains, others show monochromatic crowds and the portraits show mostly female figures.

March of Peace 2020 shows a scene of monochromatic crowds of figures from 1902 in Warrington from Warrington’s Walking Day. The defunct Fiddler’s Ferry power plant with cooling towers in Warrington is in the background. The crowd from the past is ghostly and the figures morph together between past and present in a cool blue-green light atmosphere.

About the artist

Jasmir Creed is a practice-led PhD researcher at the Slade School of Fine Art. She explores alienation and the transcultural in paintings of people in urban non-places or iconic historical sites, informed by her identity as a British South Asian artist. Solo exhibitions of paintings by Jasmir Creed include Urban Forest at Delta House Studios, London 2017; Dystopolis at Victoria Gallery and Museum, Liverpool 2018 with catalogue distributed by Liverpool University Press. Group exhibitions include Asia Triennial Manchester 2018, Home and Unhome at Sichuan Fine Arts Institute, Chongqing, China, 2020 and Art Contact, Istanbul Art Fair, Turkey 2021.