Jefferies is an artist, architect and design tutor working in London, Suffolk and Norwich. His art practice investigates the expansive spaces of urban and rural landscapes and the restrictions of domestic architectural interiors. The work references, amongst others, the landscape paintings of Richard Diebenkorn and drawings of Léon Spillaert.
His artwork uses a variety of media and scales from traditional painting on canvas to architectural drafting and projection using ink and coloured pencil on paper. In 2017 and 2018 Jefferies travelled to Yamagata Province in rural Japan, where he stayed on a rice farm and explored the ordered human intrusions into otherwise unspoilt landscapes. These counterpoints between the ‘made’ and the ‘natural’ feature in much of his work.
More recently, in a commission for the Shutter Gallery Project in Haringey, Jefferies designed an artwork for a shop’s shutters, referencing the wildlife of the nearby Walthamstow Wetlands. By day the shutters are up and the shop displays its columns of bargain rubber tyres, a product themselves of lost jungles. The work can only be viewed by night when the shop is closed. Like the birds that fly overhead the image is seldom seen but ever present.