On Mythology, the 18th Century, and the World She Paints | An interview with Jessie Makinson
Jessie Makinson's paintings hold contradictions that shouldn't coexist — and yet, completely do. Folklore and eco sci-fi. Georgian parlour games and Greek myth. Horror that smirks. Violence that looks faintly bored. We sat down with her ahead of The Mythologies of Colour at Soho House Mumbai.
Your paintings occupy a world that feels simultaneously ancient and completely ungovernable — folklore, Greek mythology, 18th-century brothel scenes, Georgian parlour games, eco sci-fi, all colliding in the same frame. Was this the visual universe you set out to build from the beginning, or did it arrive gradually? At what point did you realise that mythology and speculative fiction weren't separate interests but the same language?
I think my visual universe is formed by my interests and experience. I like to combine disparate ideas and imagery that my personal artist logic combines into something that is of my own language and of my own worlds. Often ideas float around for years before they find their place, kind of stewing away in the background. In the Autor, Hillary Mantel's Reith lectures, she talks about how an idea might wait decades for you to be ready for it.
Some of the figures in your work feel intensely specific — like they've been lifted from somewhere real, a person half-remembered or caught in passing — while others seem entirely invented, almost archetypal. How do you think about that distinction, if at all? Do real people find their way into your paintings consciously, or do they surface later?
Sometimes friends are in my paintings, but often the faces are from film stills or found imagery. I collect faces and wait for the right time to use them. The hands are always my hands posed. As it's the quickest thing to do in the moment. Yet it's where I appear in the paintings.
Fresh Ghost — Meso Ventures / Soho House Mumbai
Your works carry an extraordinary density of literary and art-historical reference — Hillary Mantel, Han Kang, Joanna Russ, Greek myth, Hesiod, Stanley Spencer, French Revolutionary imagery. How does that research happen? Is it always purposeful, or do certain books and images accumulate until they have to become paintings? And are there sources — writers, periods, images — that you keep returning to?
I read a lot and listen to a lot of audiobooks when I'm painting. I'm interested in literary storytelling and get many ideas from books. It's very rare that I would illustrate something directly. It's more that I would recognise something that would belong in my world, or something prompts an idea in me. More the feel rather than the narrative of a book stays with me, and rather than having new references I am always adding and adding. The Castle of Crossed Destinies by Italo Calvino has been with me for 25 years for example. Other recurring books are The Governesses by Anne Serre, Tyll by Daniel Kehlmann and The Vegetarian by Han Kang. I also find it easiest to talk about my work through its starting points and how I came to get to the painting. In terms of research, I would have an idea — say for a séance painting — so I would then look for historical and pop cultural imagery of séances from historical collections such as the V&A and the British Museum but also from films and old illustrations and magazine imagery. These would then combine with the feeling I had in my mind to form into a composition.
I generally tend to see the world as completely absurd. Its beauty and its horror.
There's something darkly funny about your paintings — the horror and the comedy arrive at exactly the same moment. Figures with their intestines showing are smirking. Figures in states of extraordinary violence look faintly bored. Is that tonal balance something you consciously protect, or does it simply reflect how you see the world?
I've always been interested in the casual violence in historical painting, which now appears quite funny. And I generally tend to see the world as completely absurd. Its beauty and its horror. Not to mention the kind of things we are fed through social media where the violence of war is followed by a cute kitten.
Your work has been collected and exhibited across an extraordinary range of cities — New York, Los Angeles, Mexico City, Zürich, Beijing, Seoul, Dresden. But India, despite having one of the most rapidly evolving contemporary art scenes in the world, has never been part of that map for you — until now. What does it mean to bring this body of work to an audience that is encountering it entirely fresh?
I'm very excited to show in India for the first time. It's a wonderful opportunity and privilege to encounter a fresh audience. My earlier work was greatly influenced by Indian miniatures. My use of flat, tipped-up space and interlocking shapes developed from the work I made back then.
No Claws — Meso Ventures / Soho House Mumbai
Your titles are some of the most distinctive in contemporary painting — Stay Here While I Get a Curse, A Murderer Contemplated the Colour of My Hair, Something Vexes Thee? They carry the same tonal register as the paintings themselves: funny, sinister, oddly casual, never quite explanatory. Where do they come from? Do they arrive before or after the work is finished, and how much do you feel a title directs — or closes down — the way a painting gets read?
I like for a title to add to the painting rather than to describe it. For it to add another layer of meaning and another point of entrance. My titles are collected from books, overheard conversations, everywhere. Sometimes I make a work with a title in mind, but more often I choose one after, from my lists. The title has to feel like it belongs in some way. It can't be too random. I've not thought too much about how it affects how the painting is read. When a painting is untitled, I think it is a little ungenerous.
You've used the word "evasive" about yourself when it comes to pinning down meaning in your own work — and there does seem to be something structurally resistant in the paintings themselves, a quality that deflects a single reading and keeps things genuinely open. Is that a conscious choice you protect, or does it simply reflect how you think? And do you ever find that ambiguity becomes too easy — a position that lets both you and the viewer off the hook?
No — I think that paintings are complex, and I wouldn't want to be able to pin them down. As in life, there are multiple sides to every story. There is also a clarity and directness to the language of my paintings, but there is interference running through the compositions, the colour and the patterns. It reflects the way I think and the rush I am in, often changing the subject.
A great deal of the critical writing around your work reaches for frameworks — the female gaze, ecofeminism, the subversion of patriarchal art history — and those readings are clearly not wrong. But do they ever feel like they flatten something? Is there a version of your practice, or a question your paintings are asking, that criticism hasn't quite found the language for yet?
I think that is one reading of the works, but there are obviously many other things that could be considered, like we've just discussed. My use of pattern and decoration, the complex compositions and the colour relationships.
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The Mythologies of Colour
Soho House Mumbai · April 2026 · With Parnika Mittal, Mohini Kaur & Mary Pye
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