Jessica Warboys calls on the waves, wind, and sand to help create her monumental abstract paintings. She makes her “sea paintings” directly on the beach, applying mineral pigments onto a folded canvas submerged in the water and then dragging it through the sand.
To create her coveted “sea painting”, Jessica Warboys applies raw pigment to damp folded canvases and submerges them along the shore, producing vivid swaths that echo the water’s ebb and flow - an action which itself is closely linked to performance.
Resonating strongly with the Western tradition of landscape painting, from Turner to Twombly, this large-scale painting exists at the crossroads of ritual, performance and artistic process, three important elements driving this young artist’s work.
Hung or suspended, engulfing or opening the space, Warboys chooses not to stretch the canvas, maintaining a continuous and open-ended relationship with the space is occupies.
The artist presented two commissioned paintings made on the Zennor coast near St Ives, U.K., as well as films and performance works inspired by folklore and mythology, in a solo exhibition staged in Tate St Ives’s ocean-facing galleries in 2017.