About the artist
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.
Related Events
Advisory note: the film below contains strong language.
In this film by Tate, artist Jesse Darling and a small film crew go on a road trip across the UK.
Jesse Darling, Big Dipper, 2023. Turner Prize 2023, Towner Eastbourne. Photo by Angus Mill. Courtesy of the artist and Arcadia Missa, London.
Jesse Darling, Covenants V, 2022. Installation View, Turner Prize 2023, Towner Eastbourne. Photo: Angus Mill. Courtesy of the artist and Arcadia Missa, London.
Jesse Darling, Turner Prize 2023, Towner Eastbourne. Photo: Angus Mill.