The artist blurring lines between poetry and painting

By Sophie Carter
Photography by Rachael Weeber

Featured in ArtZone #93.
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Poetry and painting go hand-in-hand for Briana Jamieson. The artist, writer, curator, and publisher enjoys wearing many creative hats, and has found her interests have a way of influencing each other.

One of Jamieson’s latest exhibition’s, Wishbone was held last year at Kaukau, a Wellington art space and store. The paintings exhibited were produced in response to Jane Paul’s poetry collection Ebbs & Floods, published by Mineral Press, of which Jamieson is both founder and editor. She responds powerfully to Paul’s work –“The muddy, green, watery landscapes of Ireland where Jane lived while writing many of the poems, the swans and the sunsets. And all of the emotions and experiences the poems are filled with.”

She works primarily in oil paint, referencing “little sketches” she made while wandering around her neighbourhood in Wellington’s Lyall Bay. “I often take a blanket, notebook, and snacks, and find a quiet patch of grass with a view.”

€3.49 Clementines, oil on canvas, 935 x 1240 mm, 2022. Photo by Cheska Brown

Pond, oil on board, 800 x 1050mm, 2022. Photo by Cheska Brown

Jamieson has always lived in Wellington, and received a Bachelor of Fine Arts (Hons) from Massey University in 2015. Living near the city’s beaches has inspired her next series of paintings, Castles, which will be exhibited online with Parlour Projects in December.

The natural world is brought into most of her work, with images of plants, birds, and the elements. She uses a palette reflecting the environment around her, the “green of a stream, the red-brown of the little hearts on clover leaves, the grey of sand on the beach.”

Jamieson is preparing for a busy summer, planning new work. “My December will be filled with days in the studio, painting as the sun comes in the window, dancing barefoot on the wooden floors as I paint.”