Jessica Harrison. Gore Porcelain

Jessica Harrison. Born in St Bees in 1982, Harrison moved to Scotland to study sculpture at Edinburgh College of art, going on to complete a practice-led PhD in sculpture in 2013, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council.

Her research considers the relationship between interior and exterior spaces of the body, but looks neither inwards towards a hidden core, nor outwards from the subconscious, instead looking orthogonally across the skin to the movement of the body itself, using the surface of the body as a mode of both looking and thinking.

Moving beyond a bi-directional model for addressing the body, Harrison proposes a multi-directional and pervasive model of skin as a space in which body and world mingle. Working with this moving space between artist/maker and viewer, she draws on the active body in both making and interpreting sculpture to unravel imaginative touch and proprioceptive sensation in sculptural practice. In this way, Harrison re-describes the body in sculpture through the skin, offering an alternative way of thinking about the body beyond a binary tradition of inside and outside.

Using stone, film, ink and resin amongst other things found and made, Harrison employs a series of shifts in the process of making and viewing sculpture, implemented to try and re-describe the role of the tactile body in-between maker, object and viewer, focusing on the tracing process of the body rather than trace of the body itself. Based on the indistinct borders of the felt rather than the seen body (which has no defined shape) Harrison’s practice explores the spatial ambiguity of touch as inside becomes outside and outside turns inward, exhibiting the felt body in space alongside the space felt within the body.  http://www.jessicaharrison.co.uk

LilY / 2013 / Found ceramic, epoxy resin, enamel paint

2013 Found ceramic, epoxy resin, enamel paint 17.5 x 17 x 13 cm