Jessica Harrison is a sculptor, educated at the Edinburgh College of Art. She’s primarily interested in how people handle and navigate materials, objects and space. Her work attempts to re-imagine those definitions.
Her Broken exhibition at Jupiter Artland (Edinburgh, July 31 – September 28) showcased ceramic figurines Harrison found and then altered. Elegant, upper-class porcelain women are depicted disemboweling themselves while wearing the same detached, emotionless expressions they had before Harrison went to work on them. They remind me of Barnaby Barford, but his work is Mad Magazine in tone while Harrison is closer to Faces of Death. The installation uses dark humor to take a little bit of the sting away. The women line a catwalk in a bright pink room. It’s a dollhouse of horrors.
Harrison says she has a problem with idealized images of women, so her work is about making them appear more human. I can see some evidence of this in the work. The women, no matter how idealized, are showing us that they are flesh and blood, full of guts on the inside just like anyone else. Another theme, though, is anxiety. To all other appearances the women are composed and ready to interact socially, but they are compelled by stress to tear and rip at their bodies. The figures are a potent metaphor for that emotion, for the clawing sensation many people feel inside but do their best to contain while they go about their lives.
Bill Rodgers is the Managing Editor of cfile.daily.
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Nice interventionist work, well realized in this instance.
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