Lin Jammet (1958-2017), The Flying Dream, 1997
Mixed media on paper
Our Item of the Month for August is 'The Flying Dream' created by Lin Jammet in 1997. This striking work on paper features in Elisabeth Frink: A View From Within, the first exhibition to take place in the South Gallery at Museum & Art Swindon.
The exhibition, which is supported through the Wessex Museums Partnership, celebrates the work, life and legacy of Dame Elisabeth Frink (1930-1993) during her time at Woolland, Dorset. Part of the artist’s important legacy was the inheritance of her estate by her son Lin Jammet in 1993.
Lin Jammet was born to Frink and her first husband, the architect Michael Jammet, in 1958. Following in the footsteps of creative parents, he trained to be an artist, studying printmaking under family friend Julian Trevelyan and attending the Chelsea School of Art in 1975-77. Jammet worked as an illustrator throughout the 1980s, and returned to printmaking in the 1990s.
On the advice of his mother before she died, Jammet worked in her Woolland studio from 1993. There he created large-scale works exuberant with colour and movement. As with Frink, humans and animals feature heavily in his art. Unlike Frink, who is best known for making sculpture in bronze, Jammet predominantly created works on paper, exploring the expressive and emotional potential of the moving figure within a two-dimensional realm.
Jammet was a talented draughtsman, and many of his artworks show the male body in motion. The Flying Dream (1997) engulfs the viewer in a dramatic, vortex-like space. The figure moves through it, turned away from us and stretching forward to an unseen destination. In this large artwork, around 1m wide, the figure is imbued with monumentality and vulnerability in equal measure.
The Flying Dream was donated to the collection at Museum & Art Swindon in 2017. Elisabeth Frink: A View From Within presents a perfect opportunity to showcase the work within a significant context. Whilst Jammet was an impressive artist in his own right, the exhibition gives us the chance to experience the creative milieu in which he was raised, and the space in which he would ultimately develop his practice.
Elisabeth Frink: A View From Within is on display until the 3rd of November 2024.
(Image Credit: The Flying Dream by Lin Jammet, Museum & Art Swindon, ©Bree and Tully Jammet, Photo by Pete Melsom)
