Jessica Warboys. ECHOGAP

About

Sea Painting, Birling Gap, 2017, was made on the shoreline of an enclosed beach set below white chalk cliffs near Eastbourne. Warboys created the painting by casting pigment onto lengths of raw canvas that are submerged and pulled from the sea, producing vivid swathes of colour that echo the water’s ebb and flow. The ‘painted’ canvas functions as a record of her collaboration with the landscape and acts as a backdrop to sculptures and films referencing Warboys’ ongoing interest with performance, ritual and the physical and psychic dynamics that give a landscape its shape and meaning.

These dynamics continue in Warboys’ new film Body Sleep, (2017) which was filmed in Parikkala Sculpture Park inFinland. The Park took almost 50 years to build and is the lifetime project of artist Veijo Rönkkönen (1942-2010). Warboys’ film is a meditation on Rönkkönen’s strange figures, caught in time, yet both dynamic energetic and petrified. Through nesting moss a mass of limbs are gradually being consumed by nature. These embedded energies mixed with an eerie sense of death and decay are the source for Warboys’ use of layering paint and sculptural forms within the frame of the film.

Within ECHOGAP these different works become characters in a shifting tableau – sound, gesture, material and colour creating a structure of echoes in a poetic play of form and action.

The soundtrack to ECHOGAP is a new work by Morten Norbye Halvorsen.

Sea Painting, Birling Gap, 2017 by Jessica Warboys was acquired by the Contemporary Art Society for Towner Art Gallery in 2017.