Jesse Darling works in sculpture, installation, video, drawing, sound, text and performance, using a ‘materialist poetics’ to explore and reimagine the everyday technologies that represent how we live. Darling has often combined industrial materials such as sheet metal and welded steel with everyday objects to explore ideas of the domestic and the institutional, home and state, stability and instability, function and dysfunction, growth and collapse.
Darling was nominated for his solo exhibitions No Medals, No Ribbons at Modern Art Oxford and Enclosures at Camden Art Centre. Taking cues from Towner’s coastal location, Darling brings together new and recent works in an installation that explores borders, bodies, nationhood and exclusion. The sculptural works Corpus (HalfStaff) and Inter Alia I (both 2022) form a fragmented colonnade in the gallery. Here, concrete and polystyrene pillars are topped with barbed wire, venetian blinds and net curtains. Pedestrian barriers and prickly anti-bird spikes also echo a hostile and controlling element of the built environment, with a jarring proximity to our domestic everyday.
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Press: Give me the zombie apocalypse any day, and a win for Jesse Darling, Adrian Searle for The Guardian.
Turner Prize 2023: anarchic, dynamic Jesse Darling is this year’s only true contender , Alastair Sooke for The Telegraph.
The Turner Prize Exhibition Promises to Tell Us Something About the Art of Our Time. In 2023, It’s Complicated - Each of the installations deals with a different aspect of contemporary society, but Jesse Darling's work was the clear standout, Jo Lawson-Tancred for Artnet News.
Turner Prize Goes to Jesse Darling, a Sculptor of Mangled Objects, Alex Marshall for The New York Times.
Image Credits: Jesse Darling, Turner Prize 2023, Towner Eastbourne, 2023, installation view. Photo: Photo: Angus Mill.