Jesse Jones’ new film, performance and sculptural installation, The Tower, is the second part in a trilogy beginning with Tremble Tremble (commissioned for the Irish Pavilion at the 57th Venice Biennale in 2017). The Tower finds its beginning point not in the witch but the heretic; it conjures the words of women burned as heretics before the first witch trials in the sixteenth century. Jones' work delves into the lost knowledge of women’s ecstatic visions through the writing and song of medieval female Christian mystics, and evokes the strange, isolated imaginaries of anchorites and hermits along with troubling histories of religious and state incarceration of women.
Jesse Jones is an artist based in Ireland. Her practice is multi-platform, working in film installation, performance and sculpture. Using a form of expanded cinema she explores magical counter-narratives to the state, drawn from suppressed archetypes and myth. She represented Ireland at the Venice Biennale 2017 with the work Tremble Tremble, which also toured to SAMSTAG Museum of Art and the Adelaide Art Festival (2021), Museo Guggenheim Bilbao (2019-2020), and venues in Dublin, Edinburgh and Singapore. Previous solo shows include: Rua Red, Tallaght (2022), Kunsthal Gent (2020-2025), Artsonje Centre, Seoul (2013), Spike Island, Bristol (2012) and REDCAT, Los Angeles (2011). Jones has a forthcoming solo exhibition at IKON Gallery, Birmingham in 2024. Her work is in collections of the Irish Museum of Modern Art,Dublin City Gallery, the Hugh Lane and University of Edinburgh. She is the 250th member of Aosdána, founded in 1981 to honour artists whose work has made an outstanding contribution to the creative arts in Ireland. She lectures in Fine Art at Technological University Dublin.
