Hospital Things

Although most people find hospital really depressing or scary, I still have a curiosity for them and their workings which keeps me from feeling this. I went and visited my mum in The Royal Marsden in Chelsea as she was recovering from her operation; it mad eme think about how every experience is relevant to my work, because my work is generally about the everyday and really, just noticing things. 

Firstly, I spotted a Turner Prize nominated work ...

And I was really, really mesmerised by these curtains. It was one of the worst days in the hospital because my mum was feeling really fed up. The other times that I had visited, she had kept the curtains to the other beds open but this day she was in such a bad mood she had them closed. This in itself - that a curtain can separate an environment even though it only really affects the visual aspect - was really interesting to me. The sounds and smells and general atmosphere were still present but it was still a significant separation. Between each curtain on the ward was a story, sets of people from different places and with different experiences. 

The curtains were also really interesting aesthetically - sterile, pale yellow with pleats to draw them back into tight concertinas,  they couldn't be found anywhere else but in a hospital. I sat and watched their shadows on the floor for ages. As nurses and patients walked through the ward the material would move in a wave along the floor, its shadow moving with it. Noiseless, I found this movement to ethereal, ghostly, very beautiful. In the middle of a sad situation, separating scared and sick people is this constant shift of fabric.

Artist Statement and Image Statement for Manchester Open Call

Jess Russell (b. Surrey, 1994) lives and works in Cornwall, UK and is currently in her final year of BA Fine Art at Falmouth University. Jess works between site-specific installation, photography and the curation of found objects to address themes of value, perception, transience and temporality. Jess has had work shown in Falmouth Art Gallery, End of the Road Festival and Tate Liverpool as part of the 2014 Blueprint Festival Exhibition. She is a core member of Café Morte, a Cornish-based research and art collective focusing on the themes of death, ritual and mortality within contemporary art.

With a particular interest in the mundane, Jess uses photographic processes, sculptural interventions and museum style collections to draw attention to discarded objects and overlooked aspects of familiar environments. Past works have included the display of obsolete library slips in the library from which they were obtained, the collection of dust from doctor’s waiting rooms and the dissection of a 28 year old dust pan brush belonging to The Royal Cornwall Polytechnic Society. With the belief that objects locate moments in time, works hint at past histories, traces of unknown lives and the infinite brevity of our material surroundings. 

Personal experience of poor vision has influenced several recent works exploring the historic connection between sight and human knowledge, the physicality of light and the fragility of vision. Interchanging visual metaphor and allegory, image and language, the monumental and the mundane, Jess speculates on our relationship to sight as a most commonplace but intensely valuable possession.

Taken from a collection of used and damaged contact lenses once worn by the artist, The Light In My Eye is a macro photograph of a discoloured and crystallised lens. The viewer is invited to reconsider this most commonly discarded and defunct object and its value. Suggestive of the degeneration of our eyes over time, it becomes a memento mori for sight and therefore our connection to the world. Activated by the camera's aperture, the image of the lens relies on light like the eye it was once designed to aid. In the image, darkness is related to the depths of deepest space, a place beyond knowledge and without understanding. Set alone in a vast black backdrop, this macro photograph of a single lens exists like a planetary body (and indeed to someone it once was the world.)

Overhead Projector

As I had loads of donated unused contact lenses I thought i would have a play around with them, as visual experiments into how I might display a collection of lenses If I found someone to collect used ones from. I first of all had to figure out what would happen when the lenses dried up, and whether they would interesting looking. The plastic is very different to the lenses I use so the results were new to me - they curled up a lot more, so that the edges became 'frilly'. I have  a number of different makes of lenses so i tested them all to see which ones looked the best. I discovered that if the lenses had little liquid on they just shrank in size without much change in shape and weren't all that visually interesting. however if I filled them with water (or solution) then they would dry with white residue/ crystallised solution. There is a curious consideration to be made over presenting found objects - although this was just a test, I wonder whether the integrity of the collection is compromised by consciously editing what the lenses will look like - curating how they deteriorate/age. 

I opened and dried 40 lenses with a view to show them on the overhead projector.

 I was pretty pleased with the result of the lenses shown on the projector. As the plastic is quite hard to see on opaque surfaces because of their transparency, showing them over light made them far more visible. There is also the option with displaying them in this way, of looking on the machine itself as well as at the projected image.

Unexpectedly, the lenses projected in prisms, so that the each had a rainbow coloured circle within it depending where the projector lens was focused. As with the carousel slide projector, the use of light and the projector lens is an important part of the work itself - the mechanism echoing some of the processes of vision.

I feel this work only really works if I can get hold of somebody's old daily contact lenses, so that it is a genuine log of the things they have seen. A museum display for these relics of their seeing. I don't really have enough time before the degree show to collect a substantial amount of lenses, which are proving tricky to source anyway, so perhaps this will have to be an ongoing project.

Moons