Jess Power | Visual Artist

Memorabilia, Mixed Media on Cotton,

30x24cm

Fountain Delirium, Oil on Canvas,

120x150cm

Excerpt from Henry Ward's "On Medieval Aesthetics"

Published by The Fleeelands foundation (2022)

Power's studio is a busy space, cluttered with numerous painting, mostly in progress, but also home to a pile of zines she had made for her solo exhibition held a few weeks beforehand, props she had created, that crop up in some of the work, and the inevitable clutter of paint tubes, brushes, notebooks and objects.

Power is a busy Painter. We talked about her process and she revealed that she doesn't work on one thing at a time but rather flits between several works, moving from one painting to another, often taking a cue from something in a work to help overcome an issue in another one. There is an extraordinary energy present in the paintings, an energy that portrays this process, this hyper activity.

Dawn, Mixed Media on Canvas,

130x160cm

Tin Hero and Lost Luck, Both Mixed Media, 12x18.5cm

Twist at The Fountain Dance, Mixed Media on Canvas, 184x145cm

Except from Jenny Eden's This Side of The End

Published by Slim Volume Press (2023)

In Jess Power's paintings we see worlds that have opened and unravelled, and we see details of these worlds in cropped sections of the paintings.

The Paintings draw us in with their aura and ingenuity, and use their agency to look back at as, looking at them. We observe these arenas as they have opened for us and we imagine.

What is this place? Is it a Machine? All parts are connected in a magical way!

Engines turn into creatures, mechanical to animal and vice versa. Things gain and change purpose, growing prongs, hair wings and spikes. A solid gestures, line forms, curve shapes and gradients take the role of a viewing public, peppered across these show grounds. These Paintings resemble a Helen Frankenthaler pulled into semi representational solidity; an Agnes Martin corrupted by medieval technology.

Backstage at The Playhouse Synthetica, Mixed Media on Canvas, 110x178cm

The Graphic Mutation of The Knight, Mixed Media

Except from Douglas Violets "Reflections on Fountains"

Published by Slim Volume Press (2023)

The Mineral images of the work can be seen as acts of iconoclasm, a destruction of the idolised "pure" concepts of interpretation. But new idols are placed on the shop floor, ones that are unashamedly human and "impure", and take a physic, narrativising shape.

Unlike the concepts of a Platonic Heaven, what Jess Depicts is much more corporeal. The forms we see are far from being excused from the grotesque political landscape of our times, and are suffused with the same deceptive drive to functionality that grows in the individual from infanthood onwards. That is, they ask about their own purpose, as we so often do.