Jessica Webster

Jessica Webster (b. 1981) is a contemporary South African artist who grew up around the mines of Durban Deep in Roodepoort. Her work is often complex in its range of themes and materiality with her focus when painting, being how the painted surface offers an understanding of the embodied unconscious. Webster pursues ideas around traumatic memory and the human predicament for sense-making as having a defamiliarizing effect on the almost mundane visual realities of daily experience. Webster’s works aim to explore not only the “affective relationship” between what she refers to as the “psychic symbolism” of traumatic experience and the inner realm of mind and fantasy on the one hand, and the outer world of reality and physicality on the other, but also the psychological “borderland” between the two. She also explores public and private concerns that are current, such as sexuality and class relations. Webster obtained her BA degree in Fine Arts from the Michaelis School of Art at the University of Cape Town, where she was awarded the Judy Stein Painting Award in 2005. The artist completed her Masters of Fine Art and embarked on her PhD in 2011. She also acquired her PhD in Philosophy from The University of the Witwatersrand in 2017. Webster’s debut exhibition I Knew You in this Dark opened at David Krut Projects in July 2009. She was also one of the artists that participated in the group show DKW Monotype Project at the DKW gallery in October 2010. Webster’s second solo exhibition called Original Skin ran throughout the month of April 2011 at David Krut Projects, Johannesburg. After completing a residency at NIROX Foundation later in 2011, she was invited to exhibit at NIROX Projects at Arts on Main in 2012. The exhibition is called Mainly Benoni. And Paintings.