Juliette Losq

Please describe yourself and your areas of interest.

Juliette Losq's work describes the borderlands at the edge of human habitation. Reclaimed by nature, these regions become spaces of speculation on what might have gone on before and what may be occurring out of sight. Losq makes paper landscapes inspired by historical optical devices such as the paper peepshow. These form the basis of drawings, paintings and installations. Though based on real sites, these landscapes become fictional through their construction, creating a partially imagined, partially ‘real’ space that can transport the viewer conceptually from one place to another. Losq experiments with complexity and scale. Installations explore the possibilities of physically immersing the viewer in drawn imagery, thereby enabling them to experience the sensation of being in the mutable and fractured spaces represented. Losq is an independent artist collaborating on projects with galleries and curators in the UK, USA, France and Switzerland. Losq won the Jerwood Drawing Prize in 2005, was one of five shortlisted artists for the John Moores Prize in 2014, receiving the Visitor’s Choice Award, and received the John Ruskin Prize in 2019. She was elected to the Royal Institute of Painters in Watercolours and the Guild of St. George in 2020, as a Royal West of England Academician in 2021, and as a Member of the Royal Society of Sculptors in 2022. In 2023 she was invited to join the Contemporary British Painting group. Losq is an independent researcher whose interests include spatial perception in landscape representation, ruination in contemporary and historical art practices, materiality and spatiality in contemporary drawing and installation practice.

Why did you become a Companion of the Guild?

I share with John Ruskin an interest in both ruins and watercolour as a medium. My work focuses on marginal areas within cities and towns - those areas awaiting redevelopment, including post industrial remnants and waste ground. Unlike the ruins of previous eras these sites are considered unworthy of preservation. By recreating the experience of such locations on a large scale I aim to elevate their status and, in a sense, preserve them as havens from the progress of both time and industrial development.Like Ruskin I am interested in the intricacy of nature and using draughtsmanship and craft to explore this. The John Ruskin prize provided me with an opportunity to show my installation, Proscenium, to a new audience in the prestigious and unique setting of the Holden Gallery. Winning the award was a wonderful recognition of my installation work and of the possibilities of watercolour as a medium in contemporary practice.

Web links: www.losq.co.uk, sculptors.org.uk/artists/juliette-losq, www.contemporarybritishpainting.com/juliette-losq, www.rwa.org.uk/blogs/artists/juliette-losq, www.jamesfreemangallery.com/artist/juliet-losq