Jessica Warboys is a British artist whose practice employs a variety of mediums ranging from sculpture, film and performance to large format canvases she titles Sea
Paintings. Her work often departs from personal or collective memories, be they historical, mythical or fictional, and her materials are often partnered with a natural
element, such as the sun or the sea.
Sea Painting, Birling Gap, 2017 (2017) was made at Birling Gap, an enclosed beach set below white chalk cliffs, near Eastbourne. Working on the shoreline, Warboys created the painting by casting and rubbing pigment onto swathes of raw canvas that are submerged and pulled from the sea. The process is closely linked to performance, the ‘painted’ canvas revealing the action of making and the contingencies of that specific time and place – the wind, waves, rocks and tidal sea pools that disperse and drag the pigment into the creases and pores of the canvas. The resulting work functions as a record of her collaboration with the landscape, in this instance somehow picking up the chalk fallen from cliffs into the sea and the rocky plateaus and sea-water pools that make up the shoreline.
These Sea Paintings are central to Warboys's work, existing at the crossroads of ritual, performance, improvisation and artistic process. It is an approach to making that seeks to manifest the physical and psychic dynamics that give a landscape its shape and meaning. They engage very directly with that border territory between sea and land, the edge in landscape, that from the beginning has been at the heart of Towner's Collection.
