Opening for "Body of Work: The Process Paintings of Margaret Jamison"

Within the essays held in Empathy Exams, Leslie Jamison draws on her own life experiences to “ask essential questions about our basic understanding of others: how should we care about one another? How do we feel another person’s pain?”

Margaret Jamison’s Body of Work, considers similar issues through the visual media of painting. Created for personal containment and catharsis and generated through the mode of process painting (a technique following a stream of consciousness style of production), the seventeen pieces in Body of Work trace the timeline of the artist’s diagnosis, treatment, and recovery from cancer.

Informed by her knowledge of design and art history, Jamison’s deeply psychological artwork has often been autobiographical in its origins. However, Body of Work stands apart from many of her other series in its imagistic potency and honest depictions of her personal experience of loss and the process of recovery.