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.)