Katerina Jebb Archival works 2000 - 2020

We are always the subject of our own work however much we try to deny it.

the works seen here were taken from my archives and comprise of fragments which possibly have little meaning to anyone else other than me.

Most of the images are scans of objects, spaces or surfaces; an apple fallen on the grave of the painter Balthus in 2010, a worn away carpet on the floor of a strange and obscure gallery in Paris, a piece of abandoned tulle thrown out of a window of a high rise housing block on the outskirts of Paris in 2003. Forlorn amongst a mass of depressed matter, a disembodied witness to a crime scene or a broken love affair.

Years later when I placed it on the scanner it curiously assumed a foetal position and thus offered itself as evidence of a memory of something that I won’t tell you about.

The child’s note written by my daughter in her seventh year consists of six lines of prose addressing subject matter of profound importance and urgency for the mind of a child entering into the age of reason.

The first line reads:

‘This would mean that life is stronger than death’.

The woman suspended from the oak tree in the garden of the Duke of Windsor is Betony Vernon who posed naked for me in the cold and desolate landscape in the year of 2005.

I wanted to understand how it felt to be physically restrained and so I vicariously used her to mirror my own entrapment in a failing marriage.

The mirrored sunglasses are by Fendi and are presented here as a functional object of contemporaneity; starkly in conflict with the other images which are somewhat uninhabited and dysfunctional landscapes.

Indirectly I am positing a question about this most vital subject matter ‘the mirror’ and more tellingly of my own reflection mirrored in its surface.