EASTBOURNE.- Towner Art Gallery is presenting ECHOGAP, a new exhibition by Jessica Warboys reaching from Birling Gap in Sussex to Parikkala on the Finland-Russia border. Viewed as a multi-layered shifting tableaux, ECHOGAP situates a ‘landscape’ of specially commissioned sea paintings across the gallery, which act as a landscape for a poetic orchestration of sound, light, film and sculptural works.
Sea Painting, Birling Gap, 2017 was made on the shoreline of a beach overlooked by white chalk cliffs near Eastbourne. Warboys created the paintings by casting pigment onto lengths of raw canvas that were 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 context to sculptures and films referencing the artist’s interest in 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 in Finland. 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. As the sea painting acts as a vista amongst sculptural works, the filmic image of the park becomes the stage for new imaginings and uncanny abstractions.
The soundtrack to ECHOGAP is a new work by Morten Norbye Halvorsen in which rows of spotlights are synched with sound creating an expanded perception of the space.
Jessica Warboys (1977, Wales) studied at Falmouth College of Arts and Slade School of Art, London. Warboys lives between Suffolk and Berlin where she works with film, painting and sculpture. She participated in dOCUMENTA 13, 2012, and further afield the 9ª Bienal do Mercosul Porto Alegre, Brazil, 2013. More recently she has exhibited at Gaudel de Stampa, Paris, State of Concept, Athens and 1857, Oslo, 2015. In 2016 exhibitions included Kunstverein, Amsterdam, Casa Massaccio, Italy, Kunsthall Stavanger, Norway and the British Art Show 8, and in 2017 she had a solo exhibition at the Tate St Ives, Cornwall.
