Jake Ewen is an artist and creative designer based in Somerset, UK. Having exhibited his work in several group shows, you may also have seen his visionary creations decorating the fields of both Glastonbury and Medicine festival in the UK.

Under the banner of Wylderness Arts, Jake creates mesmerising, totemic interpretations of animal spirits and otherworldly beings. Striking, yet ambiguous, highly detailed, yet intangible, Jake’s work depicts fleeting spirits that seem to emerge and sink back into the field of their environment, drawing the viewer into a dreamlike state, of ebbing and flowing forms.

The name Wylderness is a portmanteau of sorts, combining ‘wilderness’ and ‘wyrd’, the later being a concept in Anglo-Saxon culture roughly corresponding to fate or personal destiny. Wyrd, and it’s rich roots eventually dried up into the modern day, and rather less interesting, ‘weird’. The wilderness is a wyrd place, potent and mysterious.

'As an artist, I’m fascinated by the act of perception. The human brain comes preprogrammed to seek patterns, and find forms within apparent chaos. I’m fascinated by this and keep my work intentionally unresolved, allowing the viewer’s brain to fill in the gaps, beckoning an experience of this pareidolia function at play. If you sit with the works and look closely, you may find  little entities popping out, suggesting themselves, before falling away once more. 

Much of my work flirts with optical illusion, intended to cultivate that fleeting moment of pre-cognizance, where the line between observer and observed is still being drawn. I want people to become disanchored and, to some extent, lost in the works, cultivating a dreamlike brain state as they sit with them.’

Jake’s work stems from a lifelong fascination with altered states of consciousness and the hidden workings of the brain. As part of his creative process he uses a convolutional neural network to mimic aspects of the human brain’s perceptive functioning. The resultant images are then digitally manipulated before further processing, and repeatedly worked on in this way to bring out the spirit of his subject. 

In many ways, the AI mimics those functions of the human brain, involved in perception, in seeking to collapse the world into a coherent picture. By feeding in visual associations and cognitive artefacts, I’m able to guide the AI into a hallucination of sorts, and effectively explore altered states of artificial consciousness.

I see these works as a marriage of extremes, an exploration of the unknowable wilds of nature and the wildness at the frontiers of technology; a celebration of apparent opposites. 

The results are a modern take on a timeless tradition of mystical art.

Jake is available for commissioned works. Please don't hesitate to get in touch via the Contact page.