Hales is delighted to announce SNAKE SHAPE LAKE a solo exhibition of recent works by British artist Jessica Warboys (b. 1977 Newport, Wales). Featuring painting, glasswork, film and sculpture, this will be the artist’s first solo show in the U.S. SNAKE SHAPE LAKE highlights a multifaceted practice interconnected and informed by personal and collective memory, landscape, history, ritual and mythology. Warboys received a BA from the British institution Falmouth College of Arts, Cornwall (2001), and completed her postgraduate studies at Slade School of Art, London (2004). In 2017, the artist was the subject of a major solo exhibition at Tate St. Ives, UK. Warboys lives and works in Suffolk, UK and Berlin, Germany.
The exhibition features work from the series River Wax Paintings, which take their departure from Warboys’ Sea Paintings, where the beach becomes the studio and the canvas becomes a record of the littoral - its physical aspects and symbolic undercurrents. Recently, Warboys has introduced the river as a site for making, as well as incorporating a new element in her longstanding process. The canvases are painted with large gestural strokes in aromatic hot liquid bees wax before introducing them to the river and mineral pigments. Referencing Batik, much of the wax is then removed.
For SNAKE SHAPE LAKE Warboys is making a new two channel film and soundscape which collages together outtakes from films produced in the last decade. Exploring how her past work resonates in the context of her current practice, this cyclical piece reframes the work as a whole, sequences sealed within loops and echoes rather than isolated narratives. Fantastical glimpses of landscapes and sculptures, a cast of characters, doubling and unfolding across the screens.
In this exhibition, the paintings and soundscape create an immersive environment, punctuated by wooden sculpture and glasswork. Warboys has developed these strands of her practice for two decades, evolving methods and rhythmically perpetuating works interconnected visually and thematically. Considered and meditative, the works lie in the realm between the observed and the magical. Warboys’ deep connection to the landscape, its histories and folklore, results in atmospheric, transcendental works that are an antidote to the digital age.
