Jamie Andrews On first impression, Jamie Andrews' work is about play in all senses of the word - games, imagination, fantasy, performance or pure verbal and visual plays: puzzles to tease the eye and engage the mind. His highly distinctive pictures combine elements which at first glance seem simple, even naïve. The vivid acrylic colours, vintage toys and charms, and garish plastic alphabet letters may seem as jumbled and jolly as a toddler's playroom, but do not be fooled. Look again and, despite his light touch and misleading, cheery innocence, Andrews' works are extraordinarily expressive: witty, ironic, angry and tragic, and handled with a dark humour which goes straight for the jugular on every subject from religion and sex to politics and pollution. Embedded letters, apparently as artlessly placed as magnets on a fridge door form words with entirely adult meaning. The sugary smile on a doll's impassive pink face becomes a leer, peering disembodied from layers of impasto colours as thick as theatre curtains, making you wonder what game she is playing, what she is hiding, what lies behind the smile. Sometimes Andrews' use of toys seem less sinister than unexpectedly poignant. How better to convey the vulnerability of an individual, the low cost of life in a throw-away society? These little figures become a pile of corpses covered in blood, fall from the sky, or balance precariously on the backs of circus horses as though about to topple from the picture. Yet they have personality too: Jesus on the Cross as a yellow, smiley-faced stick figure seems to embrace his destiny, while George Bush as a floppy, puppet-like skeleton is frightening and ridiculous in equal measures. This is about play: life is a game, and life is fragile. Dr Francesca Vanke. Museum Curator of Decorative arts. cv Exhibitions 2011 Silo Arts, Lowestoft, Suffolk.
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