From Breath to Dust

I’ve written this text in which I embark on a circular journey, starting in Somerset, visiting the underworld, travelling through the earth, and coming out the other side.

Along the way, I meet Hades; chthonic deities, TS Eliot’s ashes; artworks by Patrick Keiller, Mónica Rivas Velásquez, Michelle Atherton, Libby Bove, Simon Lee Dicker, Yelena Popova, and t l k; characters from books that fall into madness; ancient holloways, abjection and raw being.

I loved being writer in residence for OD Festival - many thanks to Simon Lee Dicker for the invitation.

Photo: Michelle Attherton’s ‘Soil Seance’, 2023. Credit: Sylvia Fanstenhammer.

Archive of Destruction Reader II launch

Please join us to celebrate the launch of Archive of Destruction Reader II. Jes Fernie, curator and writer, will introduce the archive and Reader at 7pm. She will be joined by Gareth Bell-Jones (Director, Flat Time House) and Rosie Ram (Course Leader, MA Culture, Criticism and Curation, Central Saint Martins) who will briefly respond to the archive and the provocations embedded within it.

Wednesday 23 April 2025
6.30 – 8.00pm

Flat Time House
210 Bellenden Road
London SE15 4BW

The Reader includes conversations, texts, photos, statements, reflections and a graphic story on the necessary destruction of artworks; vulnerability and death; catharsis and joy; restorative practice; ghosts of our youth; and archives of neglect.

Contributions by / with artists, curators, academics and writers: Pilar Quinteros, Tschabalala Self, Joseph Constable, Jaime Gili, Alice Channer, Anne Hardy, Rosie Ram, Ben Cranfield, Jes Fernie, Josephine Meckseper, David Hammons, 3Nós3, Olu Oguibe, Jacob Epstein, Henry VIII’s Wives and Candice Purwin.

Edited by Jes Fernie
Graphic design by Daly & Lyon
Published by Flat Time House

This will be an informal affair. Everyone welcome!

Copies of the reader will be on sale for £8. All proceeds go towards contributors’ fees for Reader III.

Order your copy here

Chair of Trustees: Matt’s Gallery

I’ve recently been appointed Chair of the Board of Trustees for Matt’s Gallery. I’m thinking of this two-year role as a project and will be focusing on a succession plan for the organisation.

Five things I love about Matt’s Gallery:

1. Director Robin Klassnik (45 years on the job) talks about it as an artwork. The gallery is an artwork.

2. Artists are at the centre of everything the gallery does. Showing at Matt’s Gallery is more like a residency – the relationship that is built up between artist and staff is legendary / incredible.

3. Conversations about the lighting of a single artwork can go on for days.

4. Visitors to the gallery chat with Robin, Tim (Deputy Director), Leïla (Artists & Exhibitions Liaison). It’s a big looping conversation that is built on generosity, curiosity and love.

5. The cacti! They have traveled with Matt’s on its many gallery moves and are now enormous.

Photo: Robin Klassnik and Jes Fernie, March 2025

Exhibition catalogue text: Phantom Sculpture

I loved writing about ghosts and sculpture for this Mead Gallery exhibition catalogue. Phantom Sculpture (2023 - 24) brought together work by artists of different generations, made over the last sixty years.

Participating artists:

Rebecca Ackroyd, Jonathan Baldock, Phyllida Barlow, Olivia Bax, Joseph Buckley, Anthony Caro, Phoebe Collings-James, Jesse Darling, Richard Deacon, Redd Ekks, Kira Freije, Mona Hatoum, Phillip Lai, Kim Lim, Sarah lucas, Veronia Ryan, William Turnbull, Jala Wahid, Nicole Wermers, Dominique White, Rachel Whiteread.

Excerpt:

It can’t seem too fanciful to propose that there are probably more ghosts coalescing around sculpture than any other artform. This may have something to do with the fact that sculpture dances close to the body (its history, after all, tracks the making of monuments and statues) and that ghosts, however immaterial they might be, take up three-dimensional space in our dreams. Unlike paintings or films which create two-dimensional worlds and hug walls and screens as flatness, sculptures are objects that exist in space - we must walk around them with our bodies in order to grasp their entirety, accreting time and varying viewpoints in our wake. This negotiation lends itself to the idea that sculpture has a ghostly aura, an invisible effect that appeals on a visceral, physico-temporal level. In more ways than one, sculpture casts shadows.

Read full text here.

Publication Launch: Heavy Metals / Silk Cut

Alice Channer, Jes Fernie & Daisy Hildyard
Thursday 5 December 2024, 18.30 – 20.30

Join us for the UK launch of Alice Channer’s glossy, glamorous first monograph. ‘Heavy Metals / Silk Cut’ was published on the occasion of her double survey exhibitions across Kunstmuseum and Kunsthalle Appenzell, CH, in 2023.

The monograph features photographic series imaginatively documenting several of the multiple births of Channer’s sculptures. These images sit amongst essays by Rosanna McLaughlin and Zoë Gray, a fiction by Daisy Hildyard, a conversation between Alice Channer and exhibition curator Stefanie Gschwend, and comprehensive documentation of exhibitions and works from the last 13 years.

The launch evening will feature Alice Channer in conversation with curator Jes Fernie, e x p a n d i n g their ongoing discussions around experimental sculpture and the politics of materiality. They will be joined by Daisy Hildyard who will read from the multiple voices of Hair in my Mouth, her short fiction specially commissioned for the book.

Free entry. Book here.

Image: Alice Channer, Chrome-plating aluminium ammonite casts for ‘Starship (Super Heavy)’, 2023. Photograph: Thierry Bal.

Helsinki book launch

Helsinki launch of my book ‘Things left undone unsaid uncelebrated unplanned unfinished’ with Publics and Askeaton Contemporary Arts.

4 May 2024
12.00 - 16.00
Publics, Helsinki

Askeaton Contemporary Arts, an artist-led organisation from southwest Ireland, are resident at PUBLICS, bringing a cohort of artists associated with their ongoing programme to audiences and the artistic community in Helsinki. Collectively entitled WITH Askeaton Contemporary Arts, this initiative presents a group of people living together, co-operating and sharing common interests, resources and work in the Irish countryside.

Emphasising oral histories, little known folklore and explorations of urgent ecological research, Seanie Barron’s bespoke walking sticks, Jes Fernie’s explorations of the ups and downs of being an artist working in Ireland, David Beattie’s deep listening of ancient monuments feature. Michael Holly introduces his mapping of contemporary Irish landscapes and ecologies are presented beside Amanda Rice’s spiralling narratives of extraction abroad by the Irish diaspora. More exchanges of artistic experience and social encounter feature in Michele Horrigan and Sean Lynch’s continuing curatorial and publishing activities, researching Askeaton Contemporary Arts’ role and position in contemporary Irish and European society.

Praise the Rain

I was invited to work with developers GPE on a permanent commission for Dean Street, off Oxford Street, London in 2015. Gary Hume’s ‘Praise the Rain’ was installed in 2017 but we had to cover it up, to prevent it from damage while the surrounding public realm and Elizabeth Line station were constructed.

So Gary’s weeds were shrouded in darkness for five years (!) living a secret life, slowly changing in colour and tone, settling in to their blindness, the audience just beyond reach.

The work is a moving reflection on our tenuous relationship to nature and consumption. “Unlike most of what surrounds it, this artwork isn’t for sale. It’s a weed that could be struggling to grow through the surrounding pavement cracks. I tried to make something that is beautiful, and is of nature, as we are”. Gary Hume.

This work is part of a programme of commissions I have curated for GPE around Oxford Street in central London. Other works by Alison Wilding, Rhys Coren, and Robert Orchardson.

Photo: Voytek Ketz, Sprueth Magers Gallery

NYU Abu Dhabi symposium

I’ve been invited to speak at a conference at NYU Abu Dhabi in April 2024. ‘The Generative Archive: Research, Methods and Practices’ has been convened by Salwa Mikdadi, Director, al Mawrid Arab Center for the Study of Art, NYUAD along with colleagues at University of North Texas and University of California, Berkeley.

I’ll be using the Archive of Destruction to discuss communal memory, critical fabulation, the role of AI, and alternatives ways of constructing narratives.

Image: conference speakers at NYU Abu Dhabi, 20 April 2024

Book launch

Join us for the London launch of my new publication, ‘Things left undone unsaid uncelebrated unplanned unfinished’

15 Feb 2024
18.30 – 20.30

FormaHQ 

140 Great Dover Street
London SE1 4GW

I’ll be in conversation with artist Sean Lynch, discussing the process of researching material for the book, and doing a reading.

Taking the work of seven artists, film makers and writers who have a connection to Ireland, the book is an attempt to recognise (celebrate even!) the vulnerability, the strangeness, the loneliness, and the arbitrariness of much artistic endeavour and hard graft.

The book is part of the Askeaton Contemporary Arts programme of publications, designed by Daly & Lyon.

Order a copy here

New text for artist Natasha MacVoy

I was invited by artist Natasha MacVoy to write a text for her exhibition ‘U & I’ at Eastside Projects in Birmingham (7 Oct - 16 Dec 2023). We embarked on a rich and rambling five month-long exchange, discussing the various ways that Natasha has rehearsed, adapted and changed the fabric of her world to provide an invisible support structure for her neurodiverse, teenage children.

‘if i walk behind you’ consists of stories about her estranged father, her research into stunt performer Yakima Canutt, the voices inside her head, her work with a wig-maker, and the possibility of imagining life in another body.

Publication design by An Endless Supply.