2025    driving to zennor + stopping for flowers    cornwall contemporary

foreword    sara matson

In an uncertain world, Jessica Cooper’s paintings and drawings return us to well-trodden landscapes and a troupe of familiar things. Deeply ingrained are her memories of being driven on the North Coast of Penwith as a small child and visiting her father’s antique shop across the peninsula on Causeway Head. Now, retracing that street to collect a weekly wrap of local stems and a coffee for the studio, paths cross and new stories coalesce with the echoes of past conversations.

In this second of her three shows, to be held in the intimacy of the upper gallery, personal, cultural and geological histories slip us between open vistas and tabletops. All time is present here. Deployed with the most essential of pictorial elements, protagonists who have shaped the artist’s sense of place and self begin to reveal themselves from between the painstaking layers of painted lines and ever-present texture of the canvas: the carn, the sea, the painter’s clifftop home, and the writer’s wartime retreat, the rolling road, the sky, the dark, the searchlight, the edge.

Then we’re back.

‘Hello! Hi Jess!’ Trinkets and flower heads dance in diaphanous coloured lines on crisp, luminous sea white paper. The steam of the coffee machine welcomes in the morning sun, and the journey repeats; we smile and go about our days.