The Jest explores and revisits personal mythologies and iconography developed throughout my life and practice.

The Jest is a response to a prior sculpture, Joculatrice (1989), which was a fabric and wood installation that encapsulated a push-pull tension between traditional art, religious institutions, celebration, and mourning. While Joculatrice reveled in novel provocation, The Jest is a radical acceptance of the concepts, experiences, learnings, and trauma that I have accumulated throughout my life. The Jest is honest both in its materiality and concept, exploring and displaying tensions and complexities both within and outside of oneself. In the recent work there is no humorous veneer over difficult concepts, no dismissal of truth, and no smiley face to indicate things will all work out in the end. 

The intentional choice to put on display materials and techniques that are traditionally used as underpinnings echoes this personal honesty and champions unconventional materials that act as unlikely symbols of the detritus of my life. The Jest, acts an uncovering through construction, playing with notions of a working model and moving away from traditional notions of what ‘finished art’ looks like. I select the materials through an egalitarian lens, viewing The Jest as elements that create structure and narrative that could evolve as I evolve with it. The materials are to hand, not bought in, not commissioned, ready and willing within the space of my studio. I believe an artist is more than a stage, an era, an ism - they belong within their work and of their work, and not as a set aside isolated ‘maker’. 

While the individual elements of The Jest speak to me as representations of and sometimes literal detritus of my life, they also create a metanarrative about my experience when they are viewed as a whole. My artistic and personal journey through life has been one propelled by tenacity, hopefulness, and an accumulation of ideas. Allowing myself to step back and view this accumulation in contrast to Joculatrice allows me to see the shifting tapestry of a life made up from complex experiences and intellectual encounters. A retrospective sculpture and an intellectual acceptance of the complexities of living.