Jay Daniel Wright: Desire Path

August 2 - 25, 2024 


Jay Daniel Wright ( Berlin, Germany) 

Jay Daniel Wright was born in Nottingham, England. He spent his post high school years working with his father, learning the trade of carpentry. But it didn’t last long and the bright lights of art school soon beckoned and went off to study illustration in Bristol, England and later visual communication in Berlin. His work can be found globaly from newspapers, magazines to screens and many places in between. His clients include New York Times, OkCupid, Moog Synthesizers, Ace and Tate and The New Yorker to name a few.

Twelve years on he has had a fruitful career as an illustrator telling stories for other brands, publications and people. For Desire Path he turned his attention inwards on some of his own stories. Exploring new media and larger scale works Jay set about letting go of some of the the graphic nature of his previous work and making way for a looser approach to image making. A world of soft memories, fingerprints, smudges and smears.

Title: Desire Path

For years Jay has been reducing memories to motifs and metaphors. Translating a difficult childhood spent around parent addiction, violence and poverty on a council estate in the midlands of England.

Making for Jay has always been a form of escape, whether it’s travelling back in time visiting memories or making peace with present pains, it’s a deeply therapeutic practice that provides healing and a reforming of a difficult past.

The work in Desire Path is made from motifs that represent various aspects of his childhood, helping to create character and stage. His hometown becomes a duck, his evil stepdad a snake and fragile mortality becomes the path of the apple.