Jasmine Pradissitto sculptor on how she finds joy

Portrait of a Londoner

This week we talk to Jasmine Pradissitto, artist and physicist.

Jasmine introduces her self below in her biography, you can find out more on Jasmine on her website https://www.pradissitto.com/ and she is on instagram and twitter.

“Just be you; everyone else is already taken.” Oscar Wilde
Paradoxically, just being ‘you’ is the hardest thing to be, especially when you feel compelled to change the system. For many, I am an artist; but my family would tell you, I am simply a dreamer. I was lucky as, from a very early age; my dreams were shaped by the intense colours of Italy. We had an Italian painter friend then, Eliot, who I apparently watched sitting from a step, for hours. I have never stopped drawing and making since.

Born in Taunton to an Italian father and French mother, we moved to South London, where I still live and where my practice is based. My path to art was through the sciences, working for ICI for a brief stint and finally culminating with a Ph. D from UCL in 1996 on the Quantum behaviour of silicon. But I was also attending Goldsmiths College in the evening to study fine art. Like a lost melody that kept resonating in my head, the two worlds just seemed linked.

In addition to painting, I then set up a successful, consultancy delivering creative science and maths to children and teachers and STEAM too, has crossed into my practise. Children are the most creative of all thinkers as they simply don’t get ‘impossible’. In 2006, I finished a BA in Fine Art and since then, have shown extensively as well as taught and lectured at all levels including for companies such as Glaxo and The BBC. I am currently a Visiting Fellow, delivering a new body of lectures on Creativity, to Engineers and Scientists. This is leading me onto exciting new collaborations with businesses as well as more public speaking. Creativity and 'play' in any arena, really does strike me as a necessary evolution in an age of such scientific and technological possibilities. I believe that Artists and Art have an enormous responsibility in presenting a different perspective on the 21st Century Renaissance which is happening so very fast, especially now post-Covid.

Apart my passion for making connections, I love open space, speed, simplicity yet paradox, time spent in the 'art cave', mind minestrone, good friends, belly laughs, nature and the sun on my back.

We really are just the sum of all the things we experience and the people we meet. This holds truer for artists than for most. I have been so fortunate in the people who have added to the sum of my parts. I cannot thank you enough.
“Every good artist paints what he is.” Jackson Pollock

Her path to art was through science. Whilst completing a PhD from UCL on the Quantum behaviour of silicon in 1996 she was also attending Goldsmiths College in the evenings studying fine art. Art has always been her passion.

Her ‘Flower Girl’ sculpture currently displayed in the Horniman Museum garden uses pioneering pollution absorbing materials to clean the air around it.

We talk to Jasmine about:

1. What joy means to her
2. How she curates joy in her own life
3. How a tutor at art college gave her the freedom to merge science with art
4. Her childhood
5. Climate change and living sustainably

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