Jesse Darling, recently returned to the U.K. after living in Berlin and now teaching at Oxford’s Ruskin School of Art, uses unorthodox combinations of everyday materials and found objects to endow his assemblages and installations with potent lyricism and sociopolitical critique. Though he employs puns and double entendre, he does do with lightness, as well as generosity—there’s no shame in missing the joke. “On Our Knees,” his recent show at Arcadia Missa in London (2024), abounded with humorous conflations involving religion: a toilet brush and doily became a halo-encircled saint’s head, while an altarpiece of white bathroom tiles and industrial plastic strip curtains finished with brocade blended the aesthetics of church and urinal.
In these and other works, Darling, who was awarded the Turner Prize in 2023 for his tragicomic portrait of post-Brexit Britain, explores and exposes the contradictions and hypocrisies of various dogmas—the capitalist patriarchy, imperial legacies, nationalism, the so-called truths of the Enlightenment. Yet his shots are never cheap, nor does he spare himself. Acting as surrogates for the artist (whose right arm was largely paralyzed by a neurological disease in his youth), crutches, walking sticks that crawl, cabinets with crooked legs, and hobbled medical apparatuses and roller coasters imbue his shows with a sense of woundedness, vulnerability, and care.
Elizabeth Fullerton: Materials are very distinctive in your work. What determines your choices?
Jesse Darling: It’s intuitive. I’ve learned not to ask myself why I’m drawn to a certain object or material, I just go with it. I’ve come to an understanding of my body and the difference between a fascination, almost fetishization, with a particular object or material from the outside and a relationship with it. . .
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