Jera May
I am neurodiverse and not quite fitting in has created an endless questioning of norms which has driven my practice.
As both an artist and educator, I am committed to developing inclusive approaches to drawing and making. I understand drawing as a mode of thinking and inquiry — a way to expand sensory awareness, access the unconscious, and cultivate connection. Currently, I use diverse drawing tools, impulsive mark-making, and experimental processes to translate philosophical and spiritual ideas, alongside contemporary thinking around interconnectedness and difference.
In addition to my drawing practice, I have an evolving community-based collaboration practice and an object-based studio practice. Materially, I tend to work with something — an old drawing, object, map, story, or place. Attending to its original context and values, I reconfigure and intervene through installation, addition, arrangement, casting, collage, drawing, photography, film or performative action. These processes become ways of articulating ideas, exploring philosophical questions, and reflecting on lived experience, or to instigate change — sometimes personal, sometimes cultural, sometimes cosmological.
Writing on 'The Delirium of Joy', The artist and writer Ambrosine Allen describes;
“I felt what May had created was a kind of ghostly archive, where real landscapes are layered with inner more metaphorical landscapes and connections are formed between past and present, fact and fiction. I left thoughtful about the idea of 'sculptural film', impressed by both the physical power of the installation and the romantic illusions of the projected media, seduced by how you can get lost somewhere in-between.”
Helping Artists Keep Going
Axis is an artist-led charity supporting contemporary visual artists with resources, connection, and visibility.