Dream Factory is an exhibition of new paintings by Jessie Stevenson. This is the artist's third solo exhibition with the gallery and her first in California.
Stevenson painted the works on show following her first visit to California. The British artist is known for reworking Romantic ideals in landscape painting. Here, she made a series of plein air sketches in Ojai, Hollywood, Venice, and San Diego. Then returning to her studio in London, the sketches formed the basis of this new body of oil paintings on canvas.
Stevenson's process begins in the sketchbook, creating small colour studies in situ. Then she works up the sketches into gouache colour analogies. A trailing iridescent blue, mixed with brighter pigments, recurs across the sequence. The artist create oils with a pigment grinding process developed from their own material research. An emulsion of egg, oil, and dry titanium powder, built up in layers, replicate the texture of the sketchbook page. Once the ground is hard, the artist applies oils in successive semi-transparent glazes. Stevenson developed this technique during a Honorary Research Fellowship (2023–2025) at the Slade School of Fine Art. There, she has led workshops on drawing technique and brush-making.
In Grassy Buckeye, Cherry and Toyon (2026), hills and skies appear in successive gestures, evoking the layering of plant life in the Ojai valley. Creeping Rubber (2026) considers the freeway junctions of Los Angeles, employing verticality and straightness unseen in historic landscape compositions. Constable, Turner, and Delacroix shaped Stevenson's earlier work. In California this frame of reference extends to the American tradition, from the monumental landscapes of Albert Bierstadt to the transcendentalist visions of Agnes Pelton. Folding Waters (2026) depicts the Black’s Beach in San Diego. Jagged bluffs and pale shale rock emerge from the looping curve of the sea. A trailing lline recalls figures suspended in the haze. Walking, drawing, and writing become tools with which the artist holds a single moment.
Stevenson's paintings edge toward abstraction and, in dreamlike remove, gesture to Carl Jung's theory of the collective unconscious. Across the series, Stevenson sets a contemporary, and often distorted, idea of beauty and desire against the ecological realities of the landscape she depicts.
The exhibition is accompanied by a 50-copy publication, including poetry illustrated with sketches and photography by the artist. Poets, in particular Elizabeth Bishop, inform the titles of the paintings and the artist's first collection of poetry.
Jessie Stevenson is a London based artist and educator who was the Honorary Research Fellow at the Slade School of Fine Art from 2023 to 2025. She has exhibited internationally and received The Richard Ford Award at the Prado Museum (2022) as well as the Bartolomeu dos Santos Graduate Award from the Slade School of Fine Art (2022). Stevenson addresses themes of escapism, exploring how memory, travel, and cultural transitions throughout history alter our interpretation of place. She uses the natural world, poetry, and historical imagery to conjure feelings of visual harmony and spatial uncertainty. Recently, she examined the California coastline and the concept of American 'Expansion,' suggesting how landscape tropes relate to human intervention and beauty within a contemporary nature-culture dynamic.
