Biography
Visual artist Jila Peacock (born Iran 1948, DjallilahPezeshgi) studied medicine at London University,1968 -1973, before graduating in painting at St Martin’s School of Art London with BA Hons. Painting/Film in 1984.
Moving to Glasgow in 1990, she has been a part-time lecturer at the Glasgow School of Art(1991-3) and a member of the Glasgow Print Studio since 1990.
She now works between Glasgow and her home in Suffolk.
Although primarily a painter/printmaker, Peacock also has a great interest in music and the performing arts and worked as Artistic Facilitator with ENO’s Baylis Programme from 1989 to 1992.
Her collaboration with composer Sally Beamish resulted in a multi-media project incorporating her monoprints series TheSeafarer (2000), based on an Anglo-Saxon poemfrom the Book of Exeter. The Seafarer Piano trio, by Sally Beamish, was first performed at the Alderton Arts festival in 2001, and at the Aldeburgh Music Festival in 2016, and is now regularly in the repertoire.
The original monoprints are now in the collection of the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge. A large format book of the Monoprints is published by Sylph Editions.
In 2003-4, with an award from the Arts and Humanities Research Board from New Hall, Cambridge she made a hand printed edition of a book of ten calligraphic images made from the poems Hafez of Shiraz, the metaphysical fourteenth century poet of Iran, which was exhibited at The Fitzwilliam Museum Cambridge in 2005 and the British Museum exhibition, Word into Art, in 2006. The book is now in many National collections in the UK and throughout the world. Ten Poems fromHafez, a new version of the book, published by Sylph Editions, won the British BookDesign Award in the literature category, in November 2006. In 2008, the short animation film Tongue of the Hidden, made from the calligraphy of two of her shape poems, with music composed by Master of the Setar, Anoosh Jahanshahi, won the Tehran short film festival and was also short-listed for a Scottish BAFTA in 2008.
Her silk-screen print of a Persian shape poem Horse, was displayed at the Olympic exhibition at the British Museum from May –September 2012.
Further venues for the Hafez calligraphies between 2010-2015. Were The Robert Burns birthplace Museum, the Fitzwilliam Museum CambridgeCalligraphy Today, the ScuolaGrafica Venice, in 2013, and Birmingham Museumand Art gallery.
Peacock’s work 7Heavens, a collaboration with composer Jonathan Harvey (1939-2012) was featured at the Glasgow Print Studio and exhibited at the University of St Andrews Byres Theatre in October 2014. Her drawing on wool, TheAnnunciation, also in response to Harvey’s music, was exhibited in St Leonard’s Chapel, St Andrews.in 2014.
Her screenprint, Solomon and the Hoopoe, inspired by a Safavid line drawing in the Tehran collection, was exhibited t the Persian Picnic exhibition at the Golestan Palace Tehran in September 2017.
The print Falcon made from the words of the poem by Hafez, was exhibited at an exhibition of Contemporary and MedievalBestiaries at the J P Getty Museum LA from May – September 2019.
A new series of work made during lockdown in 2020 in Glasgow, based on a photographic study of Clydeside walkers and ideas derived from Milton’s Paradise Lost, Shadowfall, was featured at the Glasgow Print Studio in July 2021.
NATIONAL Collections
- New Hall collection of British Women’s Art Cambridge
- The FitzWilliam Museum, Cambridge
- National Museum of Scotland
- National Library of Scotland
- The Mitchell Library, University of Glasgow
- The British Museum. London
- Sackler Museum, Harvard University, Boston
- The Bodleian Library, Oxford
- The Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art TMCA Tehran
- Oriental Museum Durham University
Awards
- 2003-04 Arts and Humanities Research Board (A.H.R.B), Department of Oriental Studies, Cambridge University
- 2006 Winner of British Book Design award (Literature)
- 2006 Channel 4/Arts Council “ANIMATE!” Major Commision for making animation Tongue of the Hidden
- 2008 Nominated for BAFTA Scotland in the Animation category