Festival artist Jessica Webster joins Mid-Morning Magic’s Yolanda Maartens to chat about how she creates her art.

Webster is a conceptual painter whose work is complex in its range of themes and materiality. Her focus on the painted surface offers an understanding of the embodied unconscious. The solo exhibition by Jessica Webster, represents an attempt by the artist to challenge the basic foundations of her practice. 

The series of paintings, compiled over several years, focuses on the use of jute fabric and a cold wash substrate, which replaces the traditional cotton canvas and oil paint. This innovative approach creates a space for creative expression and encourages festival-goers to delve deeper than just the superficial aesthetic, and what is characterised as “beautiful”. Webster describes the motivation for this as a desire to challenge contemporary painting. She presents the paintings as “anti-aesthetic”. 

Jessica Webster. Photo supplied

This includes landscape photos, archival photos, pop graphics, neo-classical paintings and even games like Candy Crush. The landscape remains the core subject in the exhibition, but in this work the disruption of the symbolic landscape becomes an act of palimpses and damage.

Momentum Beleggings Aardklop presents Jessica Webster at Aardklop with her exhibition ‘A Horse With No Name’.

OFM cg