To touch grass is internet slang for stepping away from the online world and reconnecting with lived reality. It’s about logging off, walking away from the screen and grounding oneself in the here and now. Touching Grass uses this phrase as a provocation and methodology, exploring what happens when machine-generated imagery is returned to the hand of the painter.

 

The works begin with Photoshop’s AI image-generation tools. Rather than directing the software through meaningful prompts, streams of gibberish are entered by smashing the keyboard. Jonscher’s physical, human gestures disrupt the algorithm's logic, leaving chance to define what images are generated. Each artwork title is an index of the prompt that it started with.

 

The resulting images become raw material for an intuitive process of selection, manipulation and re-composition. Fragments of glitches, images, textures, and forms are layered, blended and reconfigured into abstract compositions that are equally alive and fragmented. In this sense, Jonscher is painting with digital software, using it as a tool, collaborator and extension of her brush and palette.

 

The compositions are translated into physical objects combining printed, clear acrylic panels, transparent pigment and lighting. Painting directly onto the reverse of the printed surfaces, Jonscher layers gestures of colour between image and light. Painterly mark-making challenges the flatness of the image, while the layered construction mimics the structure of a digital file. The transparency of the surface transforms the works into hybrid objects that hover between painting, digital screen and stained glass.

 

Light has an enduring relationship to painting and art history, while also being a key component in digital screens. Here, it becomes a material through which the digital and physical converge, drawing on the enduring allure of light and our instinctive attraction to its glow. The vibrant, illuminated surfaces suggest a screen, while remaining resolutely physical in their form. They bring together the intangible, fleeting nature of digital imagery with the slower, embodied process of seeing, feeling and being with a painting, or peering through stained-glass.

 

Touching Grass presents Jonscher’s reflection on how contemporary life is negotiated between the online and physical worlds. The works consider returning to the physical not as a rejection of the digital, but as a movement between the two - from machine to hand, artificial to real, and screen to lived experience.