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I was delighted to be invited by artists Emma Edmondson and Shaun C Badham to write a text for their project Dream Space: Pending Approval, a series of fire-side events, structures and an architectural pavilion that consider public sculpture and artists’ work beyond gallery and studio spaces.

In my text, I assume the guise of a ghost who lives in the yet-to-be-built pavilion. I meet other ghosts (real ones) and write about artworks by Kurt Schwitters and Rachel Whiteread.

Excerpt:

I live in this place, this perforated shelter, this thing that is newly constructed. I am lonely but that is the way I like it. I am unsure how I arrived here but I have a sense that I am a novice ghost, one that hasn’t lived many lives or seen many things.

I was invited to give a paper at this conference about inclusive curatorial practice, organised by curator Lisa Slominski at Kingston School of Art. Focusing on the work of Turner Prize winning artist Nnena Kalu, we discussed issues relating to agency, representation, facilitation and visibility. For my paper, I spoke about this new phase of curatorial dreaming, wall labels and ecstatic, chrysalis forms.

Speakers:

Rózsa Farkas – Arcadia Missa Gallery
Jes Fernie – curator, writer and lecturer
Charlotte Hollinshead – ActionSpace
Tom di Maria – Arts Access for All
Lou Mensah – Shade Media
Gabrielle Mordy – Studio A
Michael Richmond – Yorkshire Contemporary
Linsey Young – curator, researcher
David Falkner – Stanley Picker Gallery
Peter Heslip – Arts Council England
Lisa Slominski, curator, writer

It was an absolute pleasure to do this interview with artist Katie Schwab for ‘Relative Ties’, an exhibition and catalogue that looks into the work of four women from the Nicholson family. We talked about lineage, tenderness, women’s voices, death and ducks.

The exhibition is on view at the Women’s Art Collection, Murray Edwards College, Cambridge until 6 September 2026. The Women’s Art Collection is the largest collection of art by women in Europe.

Excerpt:

Throughout the process of researching, making and installing this series of works, you have been living with many ghosts, including your grandmother, your mother, and perhaps the ghost of your future self. How did you find this process of convening a séance?

I loved writing this essay for the tenth anniversary of The Line, a public art route through feral east London. Thinking through the art, the shadows, the history and our perfectly strange, muffled attempts to locate ourselves in the world.

Published by Phaidon Monacelli, 2025

Excerpt:

Recently, I have become interested in ways that we can mark time in relation to public artworks. These things that are in our lives over long periods, they can become barometers for gauging the rate of change all around, the ageing process, the shifting of a mindset or life-choices. We experience them with our bodies, our breath, our current reality, our daydreams, our perfectly strange, muffled attempts to map out our day and locate ourselves in the world.

I’m running the MA Culture, Criticism and Curation course at Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London, for a year (maternity cover).

I’m very happy to be surrounded by such lovely colleagues and students, and to be part of a course that is so generous and expansive.

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.

Excerpt:

There’s Hades, God of the Underworld, moaning about how expensive it is to keep a three-headed dog. His wealth doesn’t stem his sense of resentment that his brothers got the better deal – Zeus, the sky, and Poseidon, the sea. More horizon and access to clarity in both these worlds, he thinks. The lack of sunlight in the underworld means that Hades suffers from bone pain and muscle weakness; his skin is horribly sensitive and comes off in huge flakes. On the upside, he’ll probably outlive his siblings.

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

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

Photo: Robin Klassnik and Jes Fernie, March 2025

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.

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 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 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.

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.

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

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

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.

I’ll be talking at a conference held in Lund in September 2023 about failure, reinscription and the afterlives of public artworks.

Organised by Maddie Leach at Valand Academy, this two day event will discuss issues relating to custodianship and whether ‘failed’ artworks can be revitalised and thought anew; how this raises implications for their authorship and ownership, and what challenges it presents for commissioners, artists, architects, and urban designers. How can producers, owners and custodians of public artworks and the communities and publics living with these works anticipate and accommodate complex afterlives of public art? My contribution will focus on research connecting to my Archive of Destruction project.

Keynote speakers: Lisa Le Feuvre and Jes Fernie.

Rhys Coren invited me to have a conversation with him about his current exhibition ‘Ripple’ at Seventeen Gallery. We walked through the four spaces with an audience, a dog, and much good humour.

We talked about feedback loops, MARY HEILMANN, influences and how to recognise them, shiny verses matt objects, sculptures that draw you in and paintings that push you away, RULES PROCESSES CODES PERCENTAGES, fabricators and furniture, no beginnings and no endings.

Listen here.

I got to know Rhys when I worked with him on a major permanent commission in Mayfair, London called Everyone I’ve Ever Known(2022)

Trickster Figures: Sculpture and the Body

Exhibition catalogue published by MK Gallery, May 2023.

Design: Mark El-khatib
Editor: Jes Fernie
Texts: Francis Whorrall-Campbell and Jes Fernie

Big thanks to all those galleries and individuals who funded it / helped made it happen: Maximillian William Gallery, Action Space, Large Glass Gallery, The Approach, Kerlin Gallery, Modern Art, Karen Smith, Bina von Stauffenberg, Frank Krikhaar, Victoria Thomas.

And to the Henry Moore Foundation and the Association for Art History which funded the exhibition and Francis’ text.

Buy here

I was invited by Jönköping municipality in Sweden to write an art strategy for the city, which has just been published. Working with landscape architect Jake Ford, we produced an ambitious, in-depth report called ‘The Invitation’ which draws on the voices of local, national and international artists, curators, architects, planners and museum specialists.

Like many cities across the world, Jönköping is grappling with multiple challenges: urban expansion, a growing population reliant on a crumbling welfare state, the fall-out of neo-liberal policies, the climate crisis, and diminishing cultural funding.

I’ll be talking about the Archive of Destruction with artist Sam Durant on 26 April 2023 at Art Exchange, University of Essex.

Large-scale drawings from Durant’s ‘Iconoclasm’ series have been installed around the University of Essex campus. Based on TV and newspaper images, they depict acts of destruction enacted on public monuments and statues.

The story of Durant’s ‘Scaffold’ sculpture is written up in the Archive of Destruction. It’s a pretty compelling read, involving a huge international outcry, a ceremonial burning, and the eventual transferral of the intellectual property rights of the work to the Dakota people.

Our public garden for a new neighbourhood in Lund, Sweden, has been shortlisted for the Kasper Salin Prize - Sweden’s most prestigious architecture prize!

‘Hage’ (‘garden’) is a very simple, beautiful thing, but what makes it so special is the context in which it is embedded. Not just the physical landscape of Råängen but all the work we have done to situate it in a critical / social framework: the commissioned texts, public events, schools programme, exhibitions, seminars, extensive website development, talks, photography, social media + press coverage and involvement of our advisory panel members.

More information on the Råängen programme, which I’ve been working on since 2016, can be found here.

Phot: Peter Westrup, 2021

Trickster Figures: Sculpture and the Body

MK Gallery
4 February - 7 May 2023

Trickster Figures brings together eleven contemporary artists whose work stretches the definition of sculpture. The exhibition includes play, touch, sound and movement as well as objects that are made to be worn. Crab shells, tree roots and shopping bags sit alongside a dance floor and a water fountain. Elements will change and grow while some will never be finished.

The exhibition is rooted in the idea that new relations to the world are under construction, involving powerful slippages between binary systems, identities, humans, animals and the environment. Bodies are implicated in this new relationship, rendering them vulnerable but also magically available for new inscriptions and ways of thinking. As the exhibition curator Jes Fernie describes, “There is a leakage, a seepage in these works. Many of them allude to bodies or systems that relate to bodies. Jealous bodies, broken bodies, fossilised bodies, vulnerable, contaminated bodies. There is also love, tenderness, glamour, and compulsion.”

“The historical or mythological ‘trickster’ is often defined as a character who disobeys the rules and defies categories and conventions. The academic and philosopher Donna Haraway refers to tricksters as ‘wild cards that reconfigure possible worlds’. I see the artists in this exhibition doing just that.”
Jes Fernie

Installation view, Ro Robertson. Photo: Rob Harris.

I was invited by artists Dunya Kalantery and Rima Patel to write a text for their book ‘The Brightness of JuJu’, a collaborative project with children from Willow Bank and Harris Garrard Primary Schools in Thamesmead.

It’s a beautiful, touching, violent book made up of collage, painting, assemblage, found objects and wild imagination. It tells the story of a future world without adults in which children make the rules, discover agency, and create magnificent poetry (Curly Swift / Lific / Tailor Swift / Terrific). They invent a crunchy black that is lonely, and feel the sadness of football boots when they are dirty.

I absolutely loved writing this text - it turned out to be an ode to the imagination of children.

Order a copy here

I was invited by Christian Mooney of Arcade Gallery to launch the Archive of Destruction Reader in Brussels in December 2022. The display system, pictured here, is by artist Anna Barham.

The Reader is now available to buy at the AA bookshop, Tenderbooks, Presse Books (Forma HQ), Yellow Back Books, and Fruitmarket Gallery. You can also order a copy online from Flat Time House.

Trickster Figures: Sculpture and the Body will open at Milton Keynes Gallery in February 2023.

I’m taking a look at the varying, magical ways that contemporary artists are thinking about the body’s newly configured relation to the world - something that involves increasingly fluid movement between binary systems, human forms, animals, identities, and the environment.

Participating artists: Saelia Aparicio | Alice Channer | Jesse Darling | Nicolas Deshayes | Kira Freije | Siobhán Hapaska | Nnena Kalu | Joe Namy | Harold Offeh | Ro Robertson | Vanessa da Silva

“There is a leakage, a seepage in these works. Many of them allude to bodies or systems that relate to bodies. Jealous bodies, broken bodies, fossilised bodies, vulnerable, contaminated bodies. There is also love, tenderness, glamour, and compulsion.”
Jes Fernie

I’ll be speaking at the forthcoming Curating Contemporary Art and Design: Archives and Collections Intensive at the RCA.

My contribution will consider the status of the Archive of Destruction as a curator-led, self-initiated project, existing beyond an institutional framework. I’ll discuss the playful way in which modes of destruction in the archive have been arranged (fear, love, greed, boredom etc) in order to critique the system of categorisation often employed by museums.

I’ve been invited by Askeaton Contemporary Arts to carry out a research residency in September 2022.

I’ll be talking to artists, visiting artworks, and looking through archives to develop a text on the subject of unseen, abandoned, and unfinished projects, to be published by Daly & Lyon to celebrate five years of practice.

Photo: Lily Van Oost textile work.

I’m very excited to launch the first Archive of Destruction Reader

Tuesday 4 October 2022
6.30 – 8.00pm
Flat Time House

I’ll be saying a few words with Gareth Bell-Jones (Director, FTHo) and Jo Melvin (curator and writer) at 7pm.

The Reader includes conversations, texts, stories, artworks, and pictures by artists, curators and writers, including Joe Namy, Marianne Wagner, Katharina Fritsch, Nicole Eisenman, Kasper König, Britta Peters, Vanessa Onwuemezi, Marysia Lewandowska, Horacio Zabala, Candice Purwin, and Joanna Rajkowska.

This will be an informal affair. Everyone welcome!

Rhys Coren’s new nine-meter long terrazzo artwork for Hanover Square in London has been unveiled!

It’s called Everyone I’ve Ever Known and is Rhys’ first large-scale public commission. It’s an upbeat, joyful contribution to the streets of central London and references Rhys’ longterm interest in music, popular culture, cartoon imagery, and the public realm. In many ways the work is a bit of visual music.

It was commissioned by developers GPE and sits behind the soon-to-be-opened Bond Street Crossrail station near Dering Street.

I’ve been working on it since 2017. It’s insane how long these project take to realise.

Photo: Rhys with the work and his son Calder, 2022.

I’ve been working with UP Projects, Flat Time House, and Liverpool Biennial on a programme of online talks about socially-engaged practice. The next one is on 18 May and we’ll be discussing the ways that these projects can inspire structural change.

The conversation will involve a discussion about the relationship of artists and communities to the structures that shape society. How can the incredible range of knowledge, experience and practice that artists, curators, creative practitioners, and communities bring to these projects be used to challenge existing power structures?

More information here.

Watch a recording of the talk here

Portrait by Robin Silas

Hage, a new public garden for Råängen , has opened! Designed by Norwegian architects Brendeland & Kristoffersen, this walled space in Lund, south Sweden, is the first permanent commission for the Råängen programme and is open to all.

Over the coming years, a new neighbourhood will grow up around the space, which will shift from being an object in the landscape to a local park for a new community.

Watch a film about the making of Hage here

Photo: Peter Westrup.

My Archive of Destruction website is now live! The project brings together narratives around destruction and public art. Spanning a hundred years and many continents, it tells cumulative stories of vulnerability, interference, rage, fear, boredom and love.

The website is made up of texts and images of artworks, projects, and performances that have been destroyed by institutions, local government, the general public, and the elements, as wells as works that have been destroyed by artists themselves, or have the concept of destruction embedded within them. Examples include Robert Smithson’s Partially Buried Woodshed (1970), David Hammons’ How Ya Like Me Now? (1989), Joanna Rajkowska’s Greetings from Jerusalem Avenue (2002), and Nicole Eisenman’s Sketch for a Fountain (2017).

The aim is to create an exploratory, open-ended repository that reveals the multiple ways that public art can become a catalyst for conversations about political, social and environmental issues, as well as a vehicle for expressions of wit, humour and tenderness.

See the programme page for details of talks in June and July 2021. This is a partnership project with Flat Time House

Follow the project on Instagram

Graphic design by Daly & Lyon