Since the mid 2000s, Juliette Blightman has worked across painting, photography, film, drawing, performance, installation and text to produce a body of work that meticulously puts together the fragments of the everyday, and within that re-tell Blightman’s lived experiences. Through this her work nods at movements in literature and art (such as the Imagist poets) that have eschewed grand themes in favour of the minutia of what surrounds us; friends, family, travel, the details of interiors, the small observations that make up each day that passes.
Portraiture, both of people and the spaces they inhabit is a unifying thread across her work, as is the technique of montage that conveys a fragmentary sense of experiencing the world. Blightman’s oeuvre is rooted within the poetics of everyday life but from within that space, the works gently interrogate questions around the physical and mental spaces that social structures have constructed for the gendered subject. Her work asks: what is it to be present in the world, and what traces do we leave for others around us?
Blightman has exhibited widely at a number of institutions both as a solo artist or in collaboration with other artists, including Lafayette Anticipations (2023), Haus am Waldsee (2023), Vleeshal (2021), Kölnischer Kunstverein (2020), Western Front, Vancouver (2018), Kunsthalle Bern (2016), South London Gallery (2016) and Badischer Kunstverein (2015).
Blightman is also represented by Galerie Isabella Bortolozzi (Berlin), Galerie Fons Welters (the Amsterdam) and O-Town House (Los Angeles).