Jamie Andrews was born on the edge of Dartmoor, Devon. His inspiration to become an artist stems from his father, a dealer of art and antiques in the 1960s. Who encouraged him to playfully draw and look imaginatively at life, opening a world of visual communication and imagination. Moving from his beloved Dartmoor to the small Cornish town of Looe in 1976 at 14 years old was not a happy one, with a sudden realisation of growing up. Punk rock music and the attitude of no future dominated his mid-teens, creating a long-lasting rebellious streak. He defies limits and expectations, enjoying poking fun at more traditional methods of creating art.

Working with a childlike playfulness and naivety with the introduction of toys and charms, often vintage, highly collectable pieces which the artist works into his acrylic paintings and sculptures as a means of playing with the idea of and subverting value.

J’s vivid, tactile works bind a jovial, playfulness and innocence with much deeper messages, often darkly humorous accounts of politics, religion and the troubling events of contemporary society. Throughout the matter-of-fact and satirical documentation of worldly matters, J maintains a deeply rooted sense of compassion for his fellow man and the environment. His work is bound up in the essence of lost innocence, cleverly captured with a delicate balance between a bold display of raw tragedy with a nostalgic easiness and empathy. 

Jamie Andrews: Transitions

“When I became a man, I put away childish things”. Isn’t that the lesson not just of religion, but of most education, of all the business and the politics, all that grown-up culture and society where big, responsible adults take their fun as leisure, like a pill, swap their natural gift for devastating insights for harmless ‘learning journeys’; treat things seriously, plan out their lives and livelihoods. What could be more dismal?

The art of Jamie Andrews, better known as “J”, unleashes the revenge of the toy cupboard, a riot of playing that turns out to be anything but kidding around. Is this a trip back to the first stories of his identity, using art to communicate from the earliest age, or a boy who never grew up? The complicated, edgy backstory, with generous doses of loss, dysfunction and early rebellion makes you wonder if maybe since he didn’t get the childhood he deserved, his creations work to keep calling up other versions of it instead, spilt like Lego bricks across the floor to crunch under everyone’s feet.  

Let’s be clear: nothing cute here, nothing Toys “R” Us would endorse. Not that it takes much to twist a toy away from the rosy world of Happy Families and good behaviour: children’s play, as anyone knows, can be as brutal and absurd, as merciless and perverse, as anything in that outside world their elders and betters pretend is the ‘real’ one. In J’s realm, toys play truant or get mangled, happy and sad keep swapping faces, and everything seems ready to mean at least two different things at once. The sugar-sweet landscapes of Fuzzy Felt dissolve into an 18-certificate documentary of assaults, abductions and erogenous zones; favourite children’s book characters turn out to have a secret life as rebels or utter bastards – who knew? Toy soldiers march in their thousands to their annihilation. Glove puppets morph into pathetic, leering politicians (or is it the other way around?).

In all of this, it gets hard to say if the grown-up domain has collapsed back into its repressed childhood that no parent is ever going to be able to tidy away again (as proof we only need to think of the current craze for electing infants to the highest offices of state), or if what we’re living through is the final triumph of the child’s-eye view, with all its glorious, outrageous unconformity, come to claim its rights in the face of everything it was denied. Mess, delight, sugar-rushes; chaos; all-powerful and unrelenting imagination. The craze for collecting that powers the works is that of a genial tyrant trying to gather and organise the world into a single bedroom. Plastic baubles, acid colours, gadgets and free gifts from 1970s cereal packets: what’s being collected isn’t just trinkets but memories – or perhaps, the very mechanism of memory itself. Rhyming reversals: trash = treasure, kitsch = riches.

Just beneath the surface of all this, waiting to leak out of the dayglo celluloid or spring to life as an animated figurine, is an explosion of loss and exuberance that is particularly J’s own childhood and miss-spent adolescence, colouring everything he makes, in ways that are innocent and knowing at the same time. That’s never more true than for his ‘transition dolls’, the joyful, unruly textile figures studded with as many badges, baubles and accessories as a ‘nkisi’ power object from Central Africa, every addition a meaningful and magical invocation. Based upon the knitted alien made by his gran as a way to help a young boy grasp the loss of his father, they are excessive, irreverent and steeped in the knowledge of what child psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott calls ‘transitional objects’: the toys or materials used by infants to edge their way into understanding the world around them, into negotiating and accepting reality. J’s dolls, though, look less like a way to ease himself into a supposedly ‘real’ grownup world than a scheme to bypass its fixed ideas and repellent values, to steal a ride back to the intensity of youth’s evolving visions, as delightful and brutal as they can be: a knowing ‘transition’ that never stops merging the line from one temporary reality to the next.

“The task of reality acceptance is never done”, writes Winnicott, and just like the flow of all his artworks, J’s dolls – made to the rhythm of one a year, as wicked celebrations of friends and significant others – can never stop either: always the next game to begin, always another jewel or mascot to add, one more deft touch to keep the magic of play in the air, to play his world into existence . . .

Professor Krzysztof Fijalkowski