This is a show about endings; of the world, of friendship, of love, of life. Humans are preoccupied with endings, the finite nature of our existence both a balm and a frustration. The endings I’ve survived have been euphoric and painful, sudden or anticipated; I have ardently sought some while I’ve fought to evade others. In recent years I have witnessed a great number of endings; the end of my father, my relationship with my children's father, the end of my time as progenitor. At thirty-three my mother met her end; now at thirty-four, I have surpassed her lifespan, my end stretching out before me as hers retreats in the background.

We must all make time to contemplate endings both in terms of our own mortality and relationships and as members of a planet seemingly on the brink of collapse. The discerning eye can see both finality and possibility in an ending, to imagine that the story continues beyond its final page, that immolation can lead to both destruction and rebirth. The works I have made explore the nuance of endings in all of their complex ambivalence, from that bloody and difficult task of rebuilding and rebirthing yourself when your life collapses around you, to the vital support and dependability of the friends that will hold you through these times, their lives interlocked with yours, for better or worse. They explore the heavy work of parenting through upheaval, of sending your children into an unkind world, even knowing the wolves are just outside the doorstep, and the surprise and euphoria of finding human connection once more. The End! is an exclamation, a heaving sigh, a cry of victory; here endings are tragic and triumphant, closing the door on the past and clearing the way for what is to come.

‘The End!’ was exhibited at Post Office Projects and accompanied by an essay by Dr Chelsea Nichols. Photos by Sam Roberts.

In 2024, I was fortunate to be invited to create a series of work in response to Ron Mueck's work "Pregnant Woman", on loan to Maitland Regional Gallery from the NGV. From online media:

Kaurna Adelaide artist Jess Taylor presents us with a perspective on motherhood and pregnancy that is complex and open hearted. Her own personal challenges with motherhood can be seen in these works, capturing a range of emotions – feelings of entrapment, possession and frustration sit alongside love, joy, and empowerment. Here the artist challenges the idealised notion of the ‘good mother’, presenting motherhood in its full complexity.

Jess Taylor is also responding to the sometimes overwhelming burden of motherhood – the increasingly ‘public’ nature of a women’s body during pregnancy and the often unsolicited opinions and societal pressures endured during this time.

Using botanical symbols, the artist explores the intertwining of new life with the complexities of our own bodies, highlighting the psychological depth of nurturing something precious within.

'Mother Lode' is the second in a series of four artwork commissions initiated by MRAG to disrupt and respond to Ron Mueck’s incredible ‘Pregnant Woman’ sculpture, which is currently on long-term display.

Photos courtesy Leighsa Cox and MRAG

In 2024, I was fortunate to be invited to contribute to Neoterica, an artist led, grass roots survey of 20 mid career artists, led by artist Ray Harris. The premise for my works is below.

The series ‘Year Zero’ explores the notion of a time that comes at the death of one type of order before the birth of another. Year Zero is often a term used to denote the time period after one regime falls and before a new order can be established; a time of pause and unease, a time of potential, a precipice to stand on before taking the plunge into the new. I found it an apt metaphor for where I am in my life now, standing in the rubble of my past relationship and life, pausing before I begin to rebuild. Realised across three sculptural works, I call on symbols of justice, the heavens and worship to mourn dreams unrealised, speak to the possibilities and pitfalls of intimacy and take and test the weight of judgement that had been meted out onto me. In doing so, my work speaks to experiences both personal and shared.

Images courtesy of Sam Roberts.

The hero’s tale is a tale of inevitability. Through this narrative arc, the viewer knows with surety that the hero will triumph, no matter how dire the situation nor high the stakes. and while it is easy to see ourselves as the heroes of our own stories, to see our triumph as written in the stars, we must contend with the possibility that we are villains in the stories of others, that their journey to victory is dependent on ours to the gallows. The hero's victory is but one side of a coin, incomplete without the vanquishing of monsters or the downfall of the antagonist. To be human is to fall on both sides, to recognise that some stories must advance without us, that we might not be there in the epilogue of every person we love.

These works actualise the victories and defeats I see on the horizon, the stories that will continue because of me and those that will without me, effigies that allow me to taste these moments before I meet them. Like the catharsis of horror and tragedy, such works force us to season the muscles we’ll need one day in order to weather the losses that life demands of us all. Wrapped in the language of myth and allegory, they invite the viewer to consider their own narrative arc, to prepare for the trials to come.

This body of work was show at Praxis Artspace in Septmber/October of 2022. The work was accompanied by an essay by James Holdsworth which you can see here

Photos by Sam Roberts.

Primordial /prʌɪˈmɔːdɪəl/

adjective

1. existing at or from the beginning of time; primeval.

2. basic; fundamental.

Primordial is a collection of works borne out of a mining of personal experience. As I leave the stage of life ruled by the creation of progeny and their iron grip on my body, I again wrestle with who I am and what mark I might leave on this world; how I’ll be remembered and whether there’ll be any truth to the stories. I survey the expanse of my life and wonder how much of what I see was planted by other people, how many blooms were with me as seeds when I began, how many seeds I might still be carrying, waiting for the right conditions to burst into life. I count my desires and I count my doubts, the things burned away by trials by fire and the things left in the crucible. I wonder if these things live in other people too, just waiting for fire or rain to draw them forth, if under the skin we might all start the same, twisted and configured into the things we become, or there is some fundamental thing lurking in me alone that determine my path before I drew breath.

It’s human nature to want to see ourselves in the experiences of others, just as its human nature to offer others the chance to see themselves within us. At our core we become great excavators, digging with eager fingers to pull out fragments of ourselves, polishing their surfaces until others might see themselves reflected in their facets. Over time we take these shards and cloak them in symbolism and storytelling, translating them so that others might speak them, passing them on so others might carry them. On and on we drag out parts of ourselves; its only when we look to the stories we carry that we’ve been dragging out the same part always, that we’re finding and clothing and carrying the same primordial hope and horror that lived in the first humans and will likely live in the last the last.

These works are the moments that these ever-present fears and fascinations revealed themselves, looming out of the dark, moments of profound experience shrouded in the symbolism of myth and horror so that what once lived in my heart might live in many, revelatory in the way that all the heavy pieces of ourselves are. They’re the result of a cleaving, an opening, a delving, an honouring of moments my heart was held in a story that wasn’t my own, an offer to see the things this labour has borne and to find a home in the space it has wrought.

This body of work was exhibited at Hugo Michell Gallery in March-April of 2022, and was supported by Adelaide Central School of Art and Scammels Auctions through the Major Project Grant. Photography courtesy of Sam Roberts.

‘Crafted Technology’ was an exhibition of works by contemporary craftspeople who utilise technological processes or aesthetics in their works. The exhibition was held in Gallery Two, JamFactory Adelaide, and included Jane Bamford, Bin Dixon-Ward, Leah Heiss, Zhu Ohmu and myself.

When I began making works for this exhibition, I decided that the starting point for each work would be a single, simple function of the 3d modelling software I use, such as duplication of forms or simple subtraction of one form from another. As I began making, I started to think of the ways that these simple functions would drive narrative and spawn their own kinds of symbolism; I'm a big believer in the idea that technology both serves and shapes humanity's conceptual understanding of the world and the stories we tell each other, so I tried to think of the kind of narrative objects we would have made throughout our history if we'd had these digital tools instead of paint or clay, textiles or timber. The end result was a series of talismans of a sort, precious objects which act as triggers for enduring human ideals, digital expressions of folklore from a different timeline.

Digital mediums natively favour certain aesthetic principles; symmetry becomes an easy thing, cleanliness a given. These aspects of digital work can create a sterility at odds with felt understandings of craft; we're good at recognizing the hand of the maker, even when it's a subtle thing. That it's both absent and present in these works, that they arise through a collaborative process in which the title of creator belongs to both man and machine, that these objects contain traces of the human heart if not the hands cast them as objects from somewhere else; our most enduring stories told in a new dialogue.

Jess Taylor, Eleanor Amor & Nat Penney, Jonathan Kim, Tom Borgas, Rebecca McEwan, Amber Cronin, Christina Peek, Sasha Grbich & Kelly Reynolds, Yusuf Ali Hayat, Jasmine Crisp, Patrick Cassar | Curated by eDuard Helmbold & Gabi Lane | Praxis Artspace

On Being an Artist brings together thirteen South Australian artists who, individually or as collaborations, create work in respond to eleven ‘actions’ inspired by Michael Craig Martin’s collection of memoiresque essays of the same name. After gleaming insights, advice and interesting quotes from Martin’s text, these quotes were misread and applied as instructions on being an artist in the style of Hans Ulrich Obrist’s ‘do it’ exhibitions conceived in the 1990s.

My work ‘Nothing! Everything! The Heart of All Things!’ responded to following brief: Action 1: Cradle of Decadence. Evoke the ghost of Goya’s ‘The Disasters of War: Nada. Ello dira’. Insert several half–pages. Use variations of the same geometric forms in black, grey and white until it finds rest in a cradle of decadence.

There is a kind of self-obsession that comes with my type of making, a measure of decadence inherent in looking deep within to extract the kinds of experiences and feelings that act as the catalysts for my work. There is also a discomfort; when we hold a mirror to ourselves, we must confront the ugliest parts if we wish to bring our entirety from a space of reflection to one of action. Each time, I compete with mirrors that are far from perfect, more akin to those in sideshows, and I must take care to cut the ouroboros that would otherwise allow this reflection to alter my conception of self without end or limit.

In this work, I pivot from Goya’s Disasters of War: Nada into my own shadowy place, filled with dark figures that could be benevolent or malevolent, reaching, grappling, inviting me to look at myself. The figures reach and cajole – will their touch be gentle or grasping, will I be held or overwhelmed?

I am at the centre of all of it, and I am all of it. The central figure in Nada was alone, for all the shadows surrounding him and the cruel indifference of justice; here too, so am I, a blessing, a curse, its own kind of decadence.

Photos by Sam Roberts

Love Works is a series of work exploring the human emotion par excellence, love – as labour, as obligation, as consuming fire, as heavy weight. Recent life events – the loss of a close friend, the birth of a new child, the near implosion of a family unit – have thrown my complicated relationship to love into focus. These works are my attempt to catalogue the ways in which I love and have been loved in turn, and reconcile them with the pure love archetypes presented throughout my upbringing and by society at large.

This work was shown at SEVENTH gallery, Victoria, during September 2019. Photos by Matto Lucas.

Fleshy plains and plateaus stretching out beneath a soft pink sky. Bent legs, lax fists, faces and hair sprawled, spanning meters, a breast pointed high towards the heavens; all of this yours to explore. This is Magic Mountain.

Magic Mountain is a new virtual reality environment created for MOD. An extension on my previous virtual reality environment, All You Have To Do Is Ask (2018), Magic Mountain is likewise comprised of digital scans of my own body, scaled to enormous sizes. Using a virtual reality headset, visitors to this digital world are able to explore a vast expanse of flesh, traversing my body at will. Trailed by small companions, also modelled off my own form, the viewer is given absolute freedom to explore this corporeal terrain, while the reminder that their agency is constrained by my own is always on the periphery.

Much of the digital sphere is tied up in pleasure. In the age of unprecedented digital interconnectedness, image distribution and simulation, we are ethically obligated to contemplate how the digital artefacts we consume impact or reflect real world individuals and experiences. These ethical considerations are tenfold for female identifying persons, who often bear the brunt of contemporary voyeurism and whose digital facsimiles are often centre-stage.

Pleasure in the digital sphere is political; this work invites viewers to consider their own ethical paradigm in the face of our contemporary drive to seek or manufacture pleasure by allowing their voyeuristic tendencies to come out to play.

Deep, Dark, Desperate / Eat Your Saints is a multi-sensory installation and performance exploring individual and collective acts of violence through a feminist lens. Engaging with the morally ambiguous, voyeuristic pleasures of horror films, acts of brutality from canons of art and anatomy, and the martyrdom of saints, the exhibition will use cast forms from the artists’ own bodies, offering them up as sacrificial vessels.

Realised in wax and chocolate, these vessels are intended to be destroyed and consumed – by both the artists and audience – slipping between liquid/solid in a transformative process evoking magic, miracles, and entropy. As a historically bodily material, wax recorded the physical presence of the dead or diseased. Chocolate is equally fleshy, but an object of desire, and a reminder of the Dangerous Appetites of Women.

Through abject, simulated acts of immolation and cannibalism, the artists will confront the extreme cultural unease surrounding female bodies and identities. This exhibition was first shown at Kings ARI, and will be shown at FELTspace in later 2018.

My contribution to this exhibition, titled ‘Deep, Dark, Desperate’, was a series of beeswax candles cast from 3D scans of my own body. Drawing on ideas of ritual, exchange, and the idea that desires come at a cost, viewers were instructed to light one candle in exchange for one prayer, wish or curse, thus accepting my offer that my effigies act as the necessary sacrificial vessel required to bring their desires into fruition.

Photos by Matto Lucas.

Good Mother is guest curated by Gabrielle Lane, and featured Fran Callen, Zoe Freney, Jess Mara, Fight for Self Collective and myself.

“Good Mother is a sensitive exploration of the lived maternal experience. Ranging from evocative oil painting, meticulous 3D printed sculptures, and interactive installations, this exhibition demonstrates the vibrancy and inventiveness of six mother/artists.”

My work in this exhibition explored my complex and often contradictory experiences of motherhood, from feelings of entrapment to possessiveness, frustration, sadness, and longing to love, joy, and empowerment. Utilising symbolism of growth, death and fertility and teasing out societal narrative surrounding the every fraught ‘good mother’, these works sought to explore motherhood as something profoundly ambivalent - monstrous in every sense of the word.

Photos 1-5 by Rosina Possingham

“All You Have To Do Is Ask” is a virtual reality environment, built using the game engine Unity, and was created during my research at the University of South Australia. It was exhibited in my Master’s examination exhibition, Monsters, Meat and Meta: an artist’s guide to making a friend of the horror genre.

I initially engaged with virtual reality to offer viewers another way to experience my 3D models before realising the potential for such technology to create fictional worlds and environments. The resulting work consists of an environment comprised of images and photogrammetric scans of my body, scaled to enormous sizes, that the viewer can navigate using virtual reality equipment. Created using the game engine Unity, it is what gamers might consider a “walking simulator”, that is, an environment one can explore without the overarching narrative or goal that characterises most video games. This is an important distinction, as the technology was approached not in the pursuit of realism or engaging gameplay – the metrics by which one might normally measure a game – but from a position of how the technology can be used in the service of the conceptual concerns arising from the research. All You Have To Do Is Ask was created as exploration of the tensions between voyeurism and agency; the faces on its walls watch the person who traverses the bodies below, gargantuan faces loom out of the darkness, the gaze emphasized by the torch illuminating where it is directed. It is an experience mediated by the agency of the viewer, both as they traverse the terrain and when they placed the virtual reality headset on their head, but ultimately ruled by my decision to allow them this opportunity to interact with virtual facsimiles of my body. It is an experience that occurs in the gallery; the viewer might be alone in the virtual environment, free to do as they will, but in the gallery, there is always the potential that they become the object being watched. 

This exhibition, held at SASA Gallery, South Australia, was my examination exhibition for my Master by Research at the University of South Australia. My research sought to understand how, given the dominance of film within the contemporary horror genre, visual artists might incorporate horror within practice. Drawing upon major works of horror scholarship, my research sought to identify horror’s dominant thematic concerns and characteristics, and through studio practice, identify strategies artists could employ to respond to these concerns or otherwise fulfil the social function of the horror text. My research suggests that horror’s theories fall under three broad categories; Monsters, that is, monster stories, Meat, stories of victim-hood and our fear of our corporeal vulnerability, and Meta; stories driven primarily by the media used to tell horror’s stories and fear arising from the increased sophistication of the media and devices we use to tell stories or otherwise make sense of the world. These works, and the research from which they stem, respond to these three pillars of horror to demonstrate the rich conceptual and material terrain they offer the artist.

From the exhibition text:

This body of work seeks to demonstrate how the visual artist might make a friend of horror; that is, how they might successfully engage with the thematic concerns of the horror genre within practice.

Realised across two and three-dimensional media, these works seek to examine and subvert the social functions of horror’s narratives or use horror’s motifs as mechanisms to confront fears and anxieties, both personal and collective.

Drawing upon literature, film, and visual art’s own violent canon, these works seek to demonstrate the artist’s place in a genre which is both contemporary and enduring.

Photographs courtesy of Joseph Haxan.

In 2017 I presented a solo exhibition at PhotoAccess in Canberra, Australia. This was my first exhibition comprised of only photographic works, and allowed me to investigate the potential of presenting photographs outside of installation works or without accompanying sculptural works, as I had tended to do previously. The exhibition was accompanied by an exhibition catalogue written by Ellen Wignell, and ran from the 20th of July to the 13th of August 2017

"All Killer is an exhibition of photo-based artworks exploring the horror genre both as an expression of collective cultural fears and as a form of popular entertainment. Drawing upon the horror genre’s dominant concerns and utilising materials that reference its affective intentions and tendency towards gimmickry, All Killer invites the viewer to reflect on their own subjective responses to horror, a genre proliferated by images of suffering in which we are all nonetheless implicit."

In July 2016 I presented the work 'All Due Restraint' as a part of a series of shows called '1000 Forms of Fear' at AEAF 24:7.

"SALA Festival finalist Jess Taylor is an emerging Adelaide artist who has always been fascinated by violent imagery. The first in a series of three, 1000 Forms of Fear - All Due Restraint is Taylor’s most ambitious installation of 3D printed works to date, featuring fifty 3D-printed figurines. As with much of her practice, casting herself in the starring role she is simultaneously the tormented and the torturer. Armed with axes, spears, knives and even a chainsaw, the artist does battle with herself. A tiny tribe of anti-heroines create carnage in the parlour without spilling a single drop of blood.

Taking many cues from the visual language of cinema, the artist unsurprisingly cites the Texas Chainsaw Massacre as a seminal influence. Taylor sees herself particularly as the figure at the back right corner of the table holding a chainsaw, a weapon she says “is both fearsome and ridiculous, a reoccurring horror weapon that probably wouldn’t be all that useful”.

Connected to her love of toys and role-play, the artist says “these objects capture our great capacity for make-believe and our tendency to project ourselves and our anxieties onto objects and the world around us.” The artist imagines her audience engaging with the work, moving the models around and implicating themselves in their interaction. We’re not sure whether to recoil or laugh, which is exactly the point. In Taylor’s words “there is such fun in being afraid.”

Child's Play was an exhibition of new works shown at Floating Goose Studios inc. at the beginning of 2016. Child’s Play explores the childishness of violent impulses and the violent impulses of childhood, embracing the more juvenile aspects my work to date and of the kinds of violent material I am drawn to. Drawing on memories of teenage sleep-overs watching slasher films and the allure of something scary, as well as my observations on how common the theme of violence is in children’s games, fantasy and make-believe, this body of work explores the intermingling of violence and play. Concurrent with this exploration has been my recent admission into the world of parenthood, resulting in a more personal look at how representations of violence can be used to trigger or explore feelings of idleness, frustration, weakness, strength and power.

The works are exercises in the collision of ill intent with the absurd, impotent or humorous, offering the viewer the opportunity to reflect on their own subjective response to represented violence. Can violence be represented in a way which is palatable, or enjoyable? Are we morally free to enjoy something descended from suffering? Does the consumption of violent and terrible fictions provide a kind of cathartic purging, or does it perpetuate dark feelings and desires by giving them something to feast on? In reality, Child’s Play is quite benign; it is the fantasy that is something darker, and it is up to the viewer to decide which takes precedence.

In late 2015, I was involved in a group exhibition called 'OTHERWORLD'. OTHERWORLD was an ambitious visual art, performance, and music event to be held in the historic Z Ward building in Glenside. I presented two installations, 'Admit It 3.0', and the site specific 'I Have To Save My Family'.

In September of 2014, I rebuilt one of my previous large scale installations, 'Admit It, You've Brought This On Yourselves' in the Gardensapce of the Contemporary Art Center of South Australia. 

'Admit It, You've Brought This On Yourselves' is a space of representation, comprised of imitations of foreboding and stand-ins for trauma. A remaking of the original, 'Admit It, You've Brought This On Yourselves 2.0' examines the human tendency to project fear onto a space when prompted by the right set of triggers.

In September 2014, I presented a solo exhibition titled 'View Master' in FELTspace, Adelaide.

This body of worked continued to explore my fascination with violent imagery, methods of representation, and their ramifications. In particular, I was interested in the idea that one would play out violent fantasies through the very medium that imparted them, that representations of violence could inspire a yearning for violence so influenced by these images that images and falsehoods would be the only way to fulfill them.

The things in View Master are made to be seen. Made to be touched, looked upon, looked into or investigated; their function is dependent on viewer interaction. This invitation extended to the viewer in part allows one to experience representations of violence the same way that I do; with a sense of fun, light-heartedness; a fascination. More than this, the invitation aims to mimic the one extended by all representations of violence; the invitation to engage, and in doing so, invites a consideration of our own implicit role in the way these images bleed into reality.

This work was exhibited at Uncharted Territory. The following photographs are to give an idea of what the thing was, a difficult task given its size and complexity, particularly in the small room that it was built to fill.

Allow Me To Show It To You arose from my desire to create something that drew attention to the role of the viewer in relation to violent imagery on a more physical level. Rather than have the viewer stumble across my video work, I wanted to create a space to show them in that the viewer would have to physically engage with, enabling them to reflect that it was their decisions that lead them to see what they saw.

The viewer comes across a door in a mock-house structure, which they must open. Upon venturing inside, they are greeted by a hall of mirrors that distort their bodies and the space around them, offering an optical reality contrary to the physical. This hall becomes both narrower and shorter, drawing attention to their physicality, until they reach a dark, claustrophobic little room in which they may view a series of my videos, which where themselves based on optical tricks.The overall experience of Allow Me To Show It To You is one that draws attention to the physical act of viewing, as well as the fact that our eyes cannot always be trusted. 

Uncharted Territory was the name of the 2013 Adelaide Central School of Art graduate exhibition, where I presented my Honours year work.

This body of work explores the notion that representations of violence are able to infiltrate reality; that they may provide cathartic relief, inspire a yearning for violence, or manifest terror. Paramount to this body of work was the gaze of the viewer and the subjectivity they each bring to images of violence, as without these subjective gazes, the boundary between reality and representation remains absolute.

These works interrogate the boundary between reality and representation to explore the ability of one to bleed into the other. Perception is distorted in order to undermine the objectivity of vision, while voyeurism is invited to provoke the viewer into contemplating the implicit role they play in the manifestation of violence. 

These are images of some of the works exhibited.

Doubles, death, desire. Thresholds, horror, terror. Presence, absence, the unknown. Repetition, the Uncanny, the Void.

This body of work, presented at the 2012 Adelaide Central School of Art Graduate Exhibition, engages with these things through the lens of film, exploring representations of violence in the media through the use of horror film tropes and conventions.

Using Michael Haneke's film Funny Games as its catalyst, this body of work seeks not to critique the media and its proliferation of violent imagery, but rather engage with it with a sense of moral ambiguity. Inherently interesting to me in the way in which the line between reality and fiction can be blurred, allowing the mechanism of filmic representation to offer a world in which one can engage with death whilst remaining alive. Through the use of my own body or image, this work explores my personal fascination with death that is inextricably bound up with my ever-present will to live.