16 october - 14 november 2009

Jessica Harrison held her first solo show at Peter Potter Gallery in late 2009, creating a new work, ‘The Ascent’, specially for the show.


As medical and scientific knowledge about the body swells, the boundaries between what is inside and what is outside seem ever more defined, yet simultaneously easier to penetrate, to break through, to transgress.  In our quest for knowledge of the hidden terrain of the body, a culture of dissection, cutting and opening up has developed, an extreme surveillance of the body, an experimental, violating pushing past boundaries. 


This series of work describes this search for knowledge, its clashes and possible consequences; a science that promises to conquer the body, yet as it progresses threatens us with the vastness of our own interiors, multiplying fears with each advance. The works explore these forms of fear, a physical kind of fear that begins and ends with a body, dilating across its surface, filling its voids and cavities, projecting outward into a room.  The bodies described here are blurred bodies, with unsure boundaries, collapsed exteriors and inside out skins. They show a body overwhelmed, overtaken and overruled by fear, and our attempts to control and disperse its pervasive nature. 


Engulfing swarms dispersed across the gallery space describe bodies slowly consumed, where obsession has overruled function. The swarm possesses a sense of omnipotence where the notion of impossibility disappears. It is anonymous and as a consequence irresponsible – conscious personality, will and discernment vanish, replaced by a state of fascination, turning ideas into acts and individuals into a collective mind. A psychological state, the swarm is the shape of anxiety, moving powerfully in one direction.


Like the Medusa, the archetypal image of body-fear, these bodies show us as captured subjects, doomed by our own reflection and actions, revealing the dangers of trying to look inside oneself.  A continuing struggle between our interior and exterior, we are granted brief god-like powers in revealing an interior, that inevitably end in a glimpse of our own mortality.