Jennifer Bailey, 'Will I Make a Good Father, Mother, Sister?'

About

Jennifer’s practice explores and questions the permeability of art production to patriarchal structures, desire, capital and paid work. Often revealing the conditions of its making, her work investigates the visual codes that constitute authenticity. Departing from an interest in the productive body at work, the exhibition will include a new wall drawing, a series of ceramic sculptures and photographs.  

Jennifer's relationship to paid and unpaid work as a flexible, cultural worker forms an important thread within the exhibition. A wall drawing, rendered with paint and using the artists own body as a stamp, recalls flow charts used to represent a thought process or system. At once tethered to the language of work – to training days in which simple diagrams are used to aid workers to perform more efficiently – it also points towards a flexible body, an implication of being stretched in all directions. Exhibited alongside the wall drawing are ceramics, flat tablets embellished with ladder rung-like forms. This tonal shift in the exhibition invites us to look closely at the materiality of clay and the traces of touch in the hand-sized forms.

The title of the exhibition – Will I Make a Good Father, Mother, Sister? – resounds as a personal, even confessional question and for Jennifer 'implies a subject that is in development, or in the midst of a process of becoming'. As she frequently takes her family as a participant or subject, the title is also suggestive of this familial context, and the production of gender roles. Sarah, Jennifer's sister, is a reoccurring figure in her work and in Will I Make a Good Father, Mother, Sister? she is cast as an indeterminate corporate worker – the smiling subject of a glossy head shot.    

Jennifer Bailey received an MFA from Glasgow School of Art in 2013. Recent exhibitions include: A brief history of girliness, Space in Between, London, 2016; Flats, Intermedia, CCA, Glasgow, 2015; That’s Genetic, 16 Nicholson St, Glasgow, 2015; Mood is Made / Temperature is Taken, Glasgow Sculpture Studios, 2014; Display, Flip Project Space, Bari, 2014; Sarah, Space in Between, London 2014; Marbled Reams (edition) and Quantum Leap, Embassy, Edinburgh and Malmö Konsthall, Malmö, 2013; and Bloomberg New Contemporaries, Liverpool Biennial and Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA), London, 2012. Jennifer will take part in the Autumn residency in Hospitalfield, Arbroath in September 2016.