Is Jumalon’s latest series of paintings feels like discovering a collection of places you know, but can’t quite place. These landscapes exist nowhere in the physical world, and yet we find ourselves often pausing with a sense of having been here before.
This spark of recognition comes from how the artist works with fragments of the natural world – distorting proportions, shifting perspectives, and transforming what’s familiar into something that speaks more to memory than memorabilia.
No, these aren’t meant to capture nature as it appears. Instead, they explore how we carry places within us long after we’ve left them. Jumalon deliberately blurs the boundaries between the recognizable and the invented, creating what she calls “landscapes where one can retreat.”
Freeing natural elements from their usual relationships to each other opens up a place for us to bring in our own experiences and associations. The paintings become, in her words, “a crutch for reminiscence,” each supporting our personal journey through our own half-remembered localities.
What follows is a unique kind of shared experience. Each person might recognize different echoes of places they’ve known, might locate themselves differently within these invented spaces, yet these deeply personal responses become part of a larger communion.
With these works, Jumalon suggests that perhaps the most meaningful landscapes aren’t the ones we can point to on a map, but the ones we hold within us. Spaces that are transformed by time, shaped by emotion, kept alive with possibility.
And so these paintings become markers of a collective terrain, reminding us that even our most solitary encounters can become common ground.
Words by Bendix Fernandez
