Imprints extends Yasmin Watts’ sculptural thinking into surface, where gesture becomes line, texture, colour and depth.
Each work begins with a trace: a line, a mark, a movement or a gesture that develops across the surface. Forms fold, overlap and shift, creating rhythms that suggest movement held in suspension.
Colour and texture become ways of carrying memory. Earthy tones bring a sense of grounding, while brighter passages introduce movement and change. Layers gather and disperse, allowing the surface to build gradually through repetition, alteration and touch.
These works consider how presence leaves a trace and how physical movement can become an imprint. The surface records the process of making, holding the marks of decisions, gestures and changes along the way.
Creases. Lines. Layers. Marks. Imprints.
Every work develops through an attentive process of looking and making. Rather than beginning with a fixed image, Watts allows the surface to evolve through rhythm, movement and accumulation.
The result is not a representation of the body, but a sense of its presence: movement translated into surface, gesture held within colour and texture, and memory carried through the physical act of making.
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Liminal Reach
Figures reach into the space around them, caught between approach and withdrawal. Their gestures suggest movement that has not yet resolved, holding a sense of hesitation, connection or possibility.
The figures extend towards something beyond themselves while remaining partly held back. This tension creates a space between presence and absence, where a simple gesture can evoke an inner state without defining it.
Liminal Reach considers the space between moving towards and moving away, and the uncertainty held within that moment.
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Imprinted Rhythms
Imprinted Rhythms traces the movement of the body through marks, lines and forms that accumulate across the surface. Shapes fold and overlap, creating rhythm and spatial depth as movement becomes imprint.
The surface becomes a record of gesture, where each mark carries a trace of the movement that created it. Layers build gradually, shifting between density and openness, weight and lightness.
The work reflects on how physical movement can leave an imprint, allowing gesture to become something held within surface, rhythm and memory.
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Imprinted Rhythms_1
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Within and Beyond
Figures and forms inhabit spaces between the inner and outer worlds. Layers of shape, colour and surface create shifting relationships between what is contained and what extends beyond it.
The work considers how physical surroundings can reflect or shape inner experience. Forms overlap, recede and emerge, suggesting movement between states of connection, separation and change.
Within and Beyond holds a moment where inside and outside are no longer clearly defined, allowing the physical and emotional to exist together.
I paint with time
I paint with tension
Each mark recalls
what the body held
before words
Surface becomes language
Light becomes breath
Figures appear
not as monuments
but diminished
leaning
listening
What I Carry
Drawing on my Zoroastrian ancestry and inspired by the symbolic language of the Mulla Kurgan Ossuary, What I Carry reflects on memory, ritual and the traces carried across generations.
Layered surfaces and sculpted elements bring together arches, columns and flame, reduced to rhythms and fragments rather than representations of a specific place. The work sits between fragment and sanctuary, where cultural memory is held through material, pattern and gesture.
At its centre, the flame becomes a point of continuity. It suggests something carried forward through time: a connection to ancestry that can persist, transform and take on new meaning.
Rather than reconstructing a place, the work creates an imagined space where memory and material meet. The surfaces hold fragments of a visual language, allowing the past to remain present without being fixed.
What I Carry
A Place Between Places
A Place Between Places
This high relief mixed media work reflects on the relationship between place, memory and the experience of leaving and belonging. Simplified forms and compressed spatial relationships suggest places remembered rather than places reconstructed.
The structures appear both solid and transient, reduced to essential volumes, surfaces and openings. They hold fragments of remembered environments without representing a particular building or location.
The work considers what remains of a place after we have left it. Space becomes something carried within us, changing through memory and distance. Between presence and recollection, the familiar becomes less certain, part remembered and part imagined.
A Place Between Places holds this sense of in between: a place that exists somewhere between what was lived, what is remembered and what continues to be carried forward.
Passage of Light
This mixed media relief considers the experience of moving between light and shadow. A solitary figure stands within a narrow passage, held between areas of opacity and illumination.
Translucent fluorescent acrylic planes create a shifting field of light that changes with the viewer’s position, while darker solid panels introduce enclosure and depth. Light passes through and around the figure, altering the relationship between body and space.
The figure appears suspended in a moment of transition, neither arriving nor departing. The work holds this sense of uncertainty, where movement slows and attention shifts between what is revealed and what remains concealed.
Passage of Light considers transition as an experience rather than a boundary: a space between one state and another, shaped by light, movement and perception.
Passage of Light