J e s s i c a H e r r i n g t o n
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CAVE
Cave (detail) 2011 cardboard, wood, polystyrene, plaster, glitter, sequins, paint, light, sound, smoke machine approx 235x315x300cm
CONTENTS
Introduction Debra Wilson & Chiara Williams
Artist’s Statement Jessica Herrington
Cave Marius Grainger
Lucky (detail) 2011 polystyrene, plaster, glitter, sequins, paint 40x30cm
INTRODUCTION Debra Wilson & Chiara Williams
CAVE is the first uk solo exhibition for Australian installation artist Jessica Herrington (b 1985, Sydney) and the culmination of her residency at WW Gallery from 3 January - 3 March 2011. During her time at WW, Herrington has transforned her environment with structures and substances that represent the very ideas of sacredness and inflated worth that her work calls into question. The exhibition comprises the installation CAVE, with its purple, glowing vapours and glittering stalactites, and an accompanying series of small-scale sculptures and works on paper. Through the seemingly careless encounter of unstable and unlikely materials, which melt, expand or collapse in combination, the body of work elevates base craft materials and focuses on ideas of preciousness, value and excess. To us, CAVE is about a return to an intuitive and organic approach to making work, it is an antidote to a dry conceptual aesthetic and heralds the re-emergence of play in the creative process. We would like to thank Jessica Herrington and Marius Grainger for their contributing texts. WW Gallery, February 2011
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Quartz 2 (detail) 2011 polystyrene, plaster, glitter, sequins, paint 38x32cm
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ARTIST’S STATEMENT Jessica Herrington
My work operates within a contemporary mode of making that can be considered ‘Provisional.’ That is, work which, in an aesthetic sense seems unfinished, messy, ruined, a mistake or only exists for a short period of time. Provisional artworks are about the impossibility of creating something perfect or finished. Creating work in this way is important as it reflects the process of making as accessible to anyone. The work explores these aspects of the art object by using a combination of elements that glitter and drip, creating works that are so physically full of raw materials that they start to fall apart and deconstruct. I use combinations of materials not normally associated with preciousness and value such as plaster, polystyrene, clay, cardboard and acrylic paint. Garish colours and glitter are key ingredients, when used in an art context they are elevated from ‘tacky’ to ‘precious’. The process of making these works is messy and ongoing. When making the sculptural works, plaster is piled on. Plaster falls off. Plaster is piled back on, and the process is repeated until the material stays somewhere near where I would like. It is this back and forth, pull and push with a structure that creates the final form. When making work in this way you need to be open to negotiation with the materials.
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CAVE Marius Grainger
Upon entering WW Gallery in March 2011, viewers will be confronted with an array of neon and crystalline objects and sculptures made by the gallery’s second artist-in-residence, Jessica Herrington. In the darkness of an adjoining room there will sit a monstrous structure of wood and cardboard, painted the same matte black as the walls, floor and ceiling. The in-between of gallery and structure, a dark walk, alludes to the kind of spiritual pilgrimage more often associated with shrines, but could just as well be the playful spookiness encountered in a darkened room belonging to the local fortuneteller. A large opening lures the viewer inside this cave like structure, illuminated by purple light, thick with fog produced by a smoke machine. The work also brings to mind Urs Fischer’s Hole works, a series of openings and cavities that have been installed in the walls and floors of several major international art museums and galleries over the past decade. Fischer’s theatrical gestures, however, simulate or suggest an unveiling or uncovering of the mechanisms of the ‘white cube’. Herrington, on the other hand, has consciously developed a fantastical, fictitious open space of the imagination, creating a parallel universe into which the viewer blindly stumbles. In having left the wooden armature of the work clearly visible from the outside, the artist appears keen to make us aware of the cave’s illusory nature even before entering. By
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allowing us to appreciate the illusion as well as the construction of this illusion, Cave takes on a magic realist quality, as reality and fantasy are hybridized. The crystal has been a significant and recurring motif in Herrington’s sculptural work, and points to her interest in the intrinsic and illusory value of objects. Making reference to the symbolic significance afforded to gems and stones by the new age movement, her kitschy materials are combined and then presented in a way that suggests something greater than the sum of its parts. These works raise questions about received folkloric ideas and the power of suggestion, in an age in which scientific logic and reasoning, whilst they can clearly attest against such notions, can still not account for them. This relationship between the logical and the illogical was explored previously by the artist in a residency at the Research School of Chemistry at the Australian National University, Canberra during which Herrington cultivated crystal growth on bricks and lumps of sponge, harnessing scientific technologies to lend her faux-mysticism more credence. Herrington’s playful use of mystical imagery can also be seen reflected in the recent revival of paganism as an aesthetic in pop culture, for example in the Hollywood re-make of The Wicker Man, the sculptural works of Alexandra Bircken, and the musicians identified with the ‘freak-folk’ genre (categorised not by musical similarities so much as a common visual aesthetic). Like Herrington, the ‘freak-folk’ musicians have appropriated the new age sensibilities of the 1960’s, but injected into them a sensibility unique to a generation raised on digital and mass media. On the artwork of her 2009 album, Two Suns, Bat for Lashes has been styled as a high priestess, her image digitally superimposed onto an atmospheric desert scene using digital imaging
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technology. In Herrington’s Cave, stalactites carved from polystyrene and smeared with gold glitter hang from its roof, synthetic elements of the work which, in combination with the lighting and smoke machine, transcend their cheapness, to attain new forms of symbolic significance. The gleefully transgressive sensibility that can be seen in the Quartz sculptures has developed from Herrington’s engagement with materiality as a subject in its own right in previous oil paintings, in which the paint was applied heavily, collapsing under its own weight and dropping to the floor, before being re-applied by the artist. In her sculptures and objects this material collapse is even more evident, their polystyrene structures having warped and melted on contact with spray paint. The paints, glue, glitter, varnish and sequins that smother the object’s surface have been applied freely and intuitively, and yet, as finished objects, they communicate permanence. Herrington’s plastic materials begin to articulate, in their own, ahistorical way, feelings that we might have for the congealed layers of time and history that mold geological formations in the natural world.
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Quartz 1 2011 polystyrene, plaster, glitter, sequins, paint 42x38cm
Lucky 2011 polystyrene, plaster, glitter, sequins, paint 40x30cm
Hunk o’ Gold 2011 polystyrene, plaster, glitter, sequins, paint 47x42cm
Jessica Herrington | CAVE Published by WW Gallery, London on the occasion of the residency and exhibition CAVE, 3 Jan - 6 March 2011. www.wilsonwilliamsgallery.com/cave.htm Designed by Debra Wilson and Chiara Williams Photography by Chiara Williams Printed by WW Projects Ltd., London All artworks © Jessica Herrington With thanks to Marius Grainger Funded by WW Projects Ltd. and the Australia Council for the Arts © 2011 WW Gallery All rights reserved
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