Jessica Kirk- BA (Hons) Fine Art
The Beginning and The End.
Sentiment, Disruption, Dismantling and Becoming.
My practice is materially driven, operating through sculpture and installation as a means of reflection, reconstruction, and critique. Over the past year, I’ve laboured laying the foundations of my practice, confidently established through the use of materials and their qualitative sensibilities. Utilising this matter, I present displays of affection, recollection, and dissection, gently probing institutional underbellies in symbolic splendour.
I have been evaluating ideas surrounding perception, façade, preservation, resistance, and systems of value through “Material Conversations”; an intuitive methodology where meaning emerges through the tensions between materials, objects, and forms. The materials within my work are never neutral. Their weight, fragility, texture, functionality, and cultural associations become metaphoric ways of communicating personal and collective experiences surrounding memory, class, labour, and identity.
The domestic remains a central context within my practice, particularly the relationship between inhabited spaces and the self. Many of the forms I create are reconstructed through fragments of memory and association, tracing things no longer fully accessible. A recurring motif throughout my work has been the window; a threshold, barrier, and site of possibility. I have spent much of my life sitting at them, gazing out of them, dreaming, wishing for different scenes; entry-way imaginations. Within the work, the window became symbolic of visibility and concealment, looking in and seeing out, reflective of broader systems of restriction and control.
Through processes such as suspension, crystallisation, cultivation, and material intervention, I explore transformation, fragility, preservation, and temporal intricacies. Combining fragile glass with industrial steel, crystallised trainers, dead flowers, discarded photographs, and organic growth emerging from rigid structures, the works negotiate vulnerability and resilience simultaneously. Operating between sentimental protest and embodied dialogue, the installations attempt to create spaces where critique, reflection, and vulnerability quietly coexist.
