Exhibition on View: November 28 – December 7
Reception: Thursday, November 29, 5–6 PM

Fieldworks Gallery presents the work of Jessica Wetherly, Royal College of Art exchange fellow with the MFA Studio Art program. The exhibition, If all else fails, presents a body of work made during her three-month residency at The University of Texas at Austin. 

If all else fails considers the intelligence found in the “other” in order to see the potential of different possible futures. Wetherly observationally studied a desert environment in which she found presence of life that can survive an apocalyptic world. Large-format prints of a non-identifiable landscape site objects that appear like flotsam, as though washed ashore. The objects have a sense of buoyancy; both materially and formally they are haunted by the absence of water. The objects resonate with lost information where the trace of human touch appears suspended in a shiny eternal present. 

London-based sculptor, Jessica Wetherly’s work navigates structures of stability within a given environment or culture, unraveling the potential for disorientation. Searching for slippages and the permeability of borders, she observes the white homogenous space in which we exist – the blindness of an anthropocentric society wherein conflicts of natural and artificial, animate and inanimate, technology, machine and body come into question. Interested in how, through separation from nature, we have become desensitized, detached and disengaged, Wetherly creates artifacts, searches for material resistance, pieces together fragments and fossilizing myths of the present into ritualistic narratives. Monolithic forms are suspended, appearing both futuristic and archaic in an attempt to fold time in and upon itself, disrupting our sense of stability. Her interest in otherness results in a surreal landscape, a sci-fi aesthetic. Wetherly’s work is intuitive and playful, presenting a range of everyday materials worked to reflect her background in the traditional sculpture techniques of modeling, molding and casting. 

Upon entering the United States Jessica declared herself a Legal Alien.

Jessica Wetherly is studying for her master's degree in Sculpture at The Royal College of Art, London. She studied at The Art Academy London from 2009-2013 and Central Saint Martin’s School of Art and Design in London in 2008. Wetherly is a QEST scholar, she has been an Artist-in-Residence at Westbury Art Centre in Milton Keynes and Nes in Iceland. She currently lives and works in London. 

Scheduled

Visual Arts Center