Jessica Warboys

Originally published in Kaleidoscope issue 10, Spring 2011
view in original context here

Jessica Warboys

In the words of critic David Lewis, the work of Jessica Warboys “walks a tightrope between presence and disappearance.” Working across a range of media that includes sculpture, performance, and film, Warboys explores the psychological space created by objects and mis-enscène. With an emphasis on narrative and the evocative role that objects and processes play in the construction thereof, Warboys’s work toys with the totemic quality of her materials, placing their physicality at the center of a web of associations and metaphors. This is seen most clearly in her partnering of materials and elements. Warboys often uses found objects and harnesses natural forces as part of her process. For a technique she calls “sea painting,” the artist immerses canvases into the sea, allowing the waves and wind to trace their impression upon the canvases’ surfaces. Warboys connects her sea paintings and cyanotype photograms to her broader practice through their spatial and temporal relationship to performance or, in the artist’s words, “improvised gesture.” The career of the thirty-four-year-old London- and Parisbased artist is rapidly picking up speed: in 2011, she can be spotted in “Satellite 4,” an exhibition at Jeu de Paume curated by Raimundas Malasauskas; “Madame Realism,” a group exhibition in Maastricht’s Marres Centre for Contemporary Culture, curated by Lisette Smits; Dublin Contemporary 2011; and at the Crédac in Ivry-sur-Seine this spring