JESSA FAIRBROTHER

Resident December 2023

Jessa Fairbrother is a British artist with a background in photography, embroidery and performance. She has over 15 years experience using her own body as material. Initially training as an actor in the 1990s she also completed an MA in Photographic Studies at the University of Westminster (2010). This experience enabled her to crystallise visually how artwork and audience collide - a body that encounters the work is part of activating the work itself. Developing her needle-as-pricking-tool in relation to the body and feelings, she draws on archives to make her own ‘preposterous histories’*, frequently embroidering traditional photographic prints or simply hand-marking images with the point of the needle as a method of drawing. Jessa is represented by The Photographers’ Gallery, London and Anzenberger Gallery, Vienna.

During her stay at Domus Jessa will be working on a multi-disciplinary study of her maternal line exploring generationally collected and re-dispersed memories of Wales, France and Algeria. In speaking moments from each woman’s life the act of revealing is presented as an interweaving of inherited thoughts. Archive images make connections of surprise and revelation, building a picture to locate body itself as an archive of feelings and awareness. A huge question at the centre of Jessa’s work is - what are the boundaries of sadness? Where is the edge of it? Can you ever see the edge? The purpose of this residency for Jessa is to slow down and discover how these various stories function as a ‘pricking’ - the emotional wounds mirror the physical puncturing Jessa is known for with her embroidered and needle-marked works. In Galatina she hopes to carve out space to deeper explore the idea that you cannot tell where the notion of ‘I’ or ‘ You’ begins and ends. Multiple stories live in the skin and the cosmos. Taking her own original text as a starting point Jessa will explore ritual, dress, washing and vision. It is sermon. It is lecture. It is performance. It hovers on the edge of these things. This is a return to her performative roots.

*Mieke Bal