Jackson

Whitefield

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Jackson Whitefield

Jackson Whitefield is an artist from St Ives, Cornwall, where his family has lived for generations. He makes collage, photography, film, and books—spending time outdoors collecting ideas, then returning to his studio to sort and arrange them. For Jackson, collage is a way of thinking through what he's seen. The landscape he grew up in shows up in everything he makes.
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In the Words of the Artist

For me, collage is a form of mental map-making and indexing. It’s a way to organise ideas and to think about thinking. The act of layering, cutting, and arranging fragments allows me to explore the relationship between my art, and my feelings or observations. Not all important feelings or ideas make good art sometimes they are just thoughts, so collage helps me work that out.

My process is less about a fixed ritual in the studio and more about a rhythm of leaving and returning. I spend a lot of time going out into the world to observe, gather, and absorb, and then coming back to the studio to exhale, to index, arrange, and work with what I’ve taken in. I don’t usually go out with many preconceived ideas, unless I’ve already seen something and am returning for another look; it’s more about noticing and collecting. The studio becomes a place to process, to sort, and to map those encounters, rather than to force them into a predetermined form.

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Collage is often the first site of contact. It’s a testing ground, a provisional structure where ideas can be placed into relation. I use it to think. The act of cutting, layering, and repositioning becomes a way of organising thought. It prevents over-deliberation. In that sense, collage isn’t just preparatory, it’s a cognitive tool.

Research and fieldwork are equally integral. I go out into the landscape, mostly geological and historically loaded sites, and gather material through observation, photography, and drawing. I think of this as an inhalation. Back in the studio, there’s an exhalation: fragments are indexed, rearranged, and annotated. Many works operate like provisional archives systems of reference rather than resolved images. Sometimes reducing things helps me understand what’s most important, what I’m really trying to say.

Because the work is embedded in geology, place, and heritage, it naturally adopts structures associated with those fields such as mapping, cataloguing, museum display, evidential photography. Collage emerges almost unconsciously. From that it mirrors stratification, sedimentation, and the layering of time.

So a collage may become a film, or a film may compress back into a book or image. The movement between forms isn’t about translation so much as it is about how much weight an idea can hold, and how it can be transformed. The mediums speak to each other because they’re all attempts to register accumulation of matter, of history, of encounter.

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The place isn’t just a backdrop in the work; it’s a condition. Being multi-generational in Cornwall means the landscape isn’t something I arrived at, it's something I come from. It’s familial, geological, and social all at once. The ground holds a lot of memory and shapes how I see and make things. Living and working in St Ives defiantly sharpens that awareness. There’s the weight of its art history, but also the everyday reality of a coastal town shaped by tourism, fishing, mining legacies, and shifting economies. That tension sits quietly in the work.

At the same time, I feel I could now make this kind of work anywhere. The connections I’ve formed about why I exist and what I’m trying to say feel set within me. Cornwall gave me the framework, but the methodology is portable. I could observe and compare almost anywhere now, because the lens through which I read a place has already been shaped.

For me, artist books are like exhibitions in my head, but with a freedom that comes from the form itself. A book allows me complete control over how the work is presented and how it feels. I also like the idea of someone picking it up and discovering my thoughts and ideas, almost like little manifestos that move through the world independently.

I felt like I was finally telling my own story and had found a language to do it. That moment when the work started to speak from my own perspective rather than trying to answer external expectations was liberating.

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About the Artist

Jackson Whitefield, a Cornish-born artist, explores themes of geology, anthropology, science, process, and language through a diverse range of media, including photography, film, collage, book-making, and site-specific works. Adopting a fluid and responsive methodology, he seeks to explore the complex interplay between the earth's geological structures, human history, and the modes of communication that help us comprehend our role in the world.

This approach fosters a connection between the natural world and human perception, guiding his investigative process from a stance of openness rather than adhering to predefined conclusions, and prompts questioning about the nature of art, its creation, and its definition. Through this perspective, Whitefield's work encourages a reevaluation of the environment as a catalyst for artistic inquiry, emphasising a process that evolves in tandem with the ecological and cultural intricacies of his Celtic surroundings.

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