The Tactile World of

There is something immediately recognisable about Jasmine Dowling's work. The Australian multidisciplinary artist has spent over a decade building a practice that feels at once handmade and cinematic, nostalgic and completely contemporary. Working across illustration, photography, videography and mixed media, she has carved out a space in the creative landscape that is entirely her own, collaborating with luxury and beauty brands such as Aesop, Cartier, Longchamp, Gucci Beauty and Tom Ford.

Dowling describes herself as a still and motion creative, and it is precisely that dual focus that defines her output. Her eye for light, colour and texture drives everything she makes. She started out in design and illustration, then allowed her curiosity to pull her toward photography, and eventually into videography. Rather than seeing this as a fragmentation of her practice, she embraced each new medium as an extension of the last. The result is a body of work where disciplines bleed into one another with remarkable fluency.

What sets Dowling apart in the world of motion is not speed or spectacle but restraint. Her animations are soft and slow, often built from physical materials assembled in front of a camera rather than rendered on a screen. Paper folded into fortune tellers, pencils laid into patterns, flowers arranged and then distorted through glass, she brings a craft sensibility to moving image that is genuinely rare. The process is tactile and considered, with each visual element photographed and formatted before a frame of animation begins.

This hands-on philosophy runs through everything. Before executing a commissioned idea, she tests it physically to ensure she can actually pull it off, which gives her work a grounded, analog warmth even when the final product is polished and professional. She has spoken about the importance of testing ideas in the real world before committing to production, and that discipline is visible in the confidence of the finished work.

Much of the emotional power in Dowling's motion work comes from a deliberate sense of nostalgia. She has described looking back at crafts from her own childhood and thinking about how to adapt those processes into something that feels modern. That tension, between the remembered and the new, between the handmade and the commercial, is what gives her films for brands like Aesop and Longchamp their distinctive warmth.

One of her most celebrated recent projects was a film made for Aesop featuring her own mother and ninety year old grandmother. The idea had been sitting with her since she watched her grandmother pruning roses, and she knew immediately that Aesop was the right home for it. The result was quietly moving, a piece of commercial work that also functioned as a personal document. It is a good example of how Dowling manages to keep her own voice intact even within a client brief, a balancing act she puts down to never losing sight of personal projects alongside paid work. In her practice, the two feed each other, and the motion work is richer for it.