Jess Rippengale

Jess Rippengale’s  work explores the British coastline. Having spent a decade in London, where it felt as far away as childhood, and as impossible to reach as her memories, it became a metaphor for longing. The idea that nature forms a large part of the work, and Jess is a conduit through which it speaks, is one that is reflected in her use of natural fibres: she creates yarn from the tendrils of ‘mermaid’s purses’, the egg cases of the small-spotted catshark. 

She enjoys the sense of collaboration that occurs with this fibre, as it coils and only half gives way to the persuasion of water and tension. How its golden colour and translucent nature is reminiscent of sunlight on the sea, its irregular shapes appearing like waves and ripples. Uncertainty and the relinquishing of control is a process of negotiation through which the sea is finding its own voice within the structure of her work.