Artist: Jessica Warboys
Exhibition title: ANTIGONES NET
Curated by: Mathijs van Geest
Venue: Hordaland Kunstsenter, Bergen, Norway
Date: August 30 – October 6, 2024
Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Hordaland Kunstsenter
Note: Exhibition floor plan is available here
ROPE TWISTS ROPE KNOTS NET NOT NOOSE ANTIGONE ROSE ANTIGONE ROSE
The exhibition ANTIGONES NET by Jessica Warboys began with the artist’s encounter with the play Antigone by French playwright Jean Anouilh. Warboys, an artist that listens closely to chance, inconspicuous signs and perhaps even fate, found a copy of the play — dropped in a street, in Paris.
Antigone, originally a Greek tragedy written by Sophocles (440 BC), is a story of Oedipus’ daughter, a young woman who purposely disobeys a direct order from the King, her uncle, knowing the fatal consequences that will follow. Ceaselessly, over the centuries Antigone has been rewritten and performed, inspiring contemporary culture, philosophy and psychoanalysis in proposing a complex reading of politics, desire, gender, resistance and punishment.
Within a new multi-channel film and sound work also titled ANTIGONES NET, a faceted Antigone is visualised through prop and place. The narrative begins with the simultaneous burial and un-earthing of an iron egg — an egg impenetrable and fertile, perhaps cursed, an egg emblematic of both the armor of war and rebirth. The performative, scripted and improvised is central to the work, and will be expanded through live elements of voice and sound within the exhibition space, during the opening event.
In direct relation to the films is a group of large, unstretched paintings, Sea Paintings, Antigones Net 2024, these are part of an ongoing series Warboys began in 2009. Suspended in the exhibition space the paintings propose a backdrop, a setting, perhaps for a stage. Sea Paintings are made in collaboration with the waves, wind, sand and rock at specific coastal locations. These elements animate pigment scattered onto the canvas — the completed paintings are full of marks and traces, partly from directed gestures, partly from the uncontrollable processes of nature. Working within the liminal space between the sea and the sea shore, the paintings are also a record of time and place.
Warboys’ attention to the process and possibilities of the painting medium are both ritualistic and performative. Her process is intuitive, malleable and in constant dialogue with her environment. In Warboy’s paintings as well as her video works the mystical mechanics of myth-making are filtered through the now, to explore landscape, identity, hope and the poetic.
Jessica Warboys was born in Newport, Wales, UK, she studied at Falmouth College of Arts, Cornwall and The Slade, London, and is currently based between Bergen and Berlin. Since Spring 2023 Warboys has been a professor in the Painting Department at KMD, University of Bergen.
Warboys has exhibited widely including the selected exhibitions: Meia-Noite, Coimbra Biennial of Contemporary Art, Portugal (2022) Earth Panther, Galerie Noah Klink, Berlin (2021) The Ghost Ship and the Sea Change, Göteborg Biennale, Sweden (2021) 2020202, Gaudel de Stampa, Paris (2020) Hill of Dreams, Tate St Ives, Cornwall, UK (2017) Topo Scenic, Kunsthall Stavanger, NO (2016) Angle Pose, Kunstverein Amsterdam (2016) Superior Props, 1857, Oslo (2015) Ab Ovo, Spike Island, Bristol, UK (2013), TAILS, Bielefelder Kunstverein, Bielefeld, DE (2012), dOCUMENTA 13, Kassel, DE (2012) and Victory Park Tree Painting, Cell Project Space, London (2011).
