Jerusha West

In July 2025, British visual artist and filmmaker Jerusha West spent 6 weeks in residence at Palmerino. For Jerusha, it was a moment of stillness and space, a pause from the intensity of city life in London, and a chance to reconnect with her multidisciplinary practice in a calm and creative setting.

Jerusha began her formal art education with a Foundation course at Central Saint Martins, before going on to study at The Slade School of Fine Art (UCL). Though trained in the painting department, she was always encouraged to explore multiple mediums, especially by her tutor Alastair Mackinven.

At the heart of Jerusha’s practice in Palmerino is drawing, a medium she uses to explore narrative moments through surreal mark-making and grounded imagery. Her influences span from the mythological and fantastical worlds of Richard Dadd, to the atmospheric landscapes of Paul Nash and William Turner, and the soft, contemplative palettes of Agnes Martin. Her time during the COVID pandemic, spent in Suffolk, was especially productive, influenced by the natural surroundings and the British landscape tradition. It was there she produced a lot of drawings and paintings, and also made her first short film.

Jerusha’s creative world balances intuition and structure. While drawing comes from an instinctive place, filmmaking allows for planned narrative construction. She sees the two as complementary: themes that emerge in her drawings often resurface, more explicitly, in her films. An upcoming project involves a multi-screen moving image installation.

She has already completed three art-house short films — Solidago, Sea Holly, and Stinging Nettles. The first two have been shown at film festivals, and the latter was recently completed

Jerusha came to Palmerino on the recommendation of a fellow artist and academic. She was drawn not only by the Italian culture and architecture, but also by the romantic theatricality that Italy embodies. Which is something that aligns with her own work, which often includes elements of stage sets, performance, masks, and magic.

She was particularly captivated by Florence’s churches, with their striped façades, which she described as looking like “sweet treats” or stage props, visual elements that inspired new ideas in her drawings. At the same time, the natural setting of Palmerino, surrounded by the Tuscan countryside, offered both calm and stimulation, an ideal environment for reflection and creation.

Unlike the pressure that often accompanies film production, Palmerino provided unstructured time, a therapeutic and cathartic space where she could work on both her visual art and early ideas for more film scripts, without external deadlines. By Lucie Vittoz