Straw House

This work is a collection of sculptures made using the true fresco method on erosion blocking straw wattles. I am working with fresco on different found materials, continuing in my research into our present state of climate precariousness and abstraction of place. I am a new transplant in the Rocky Mountain Region of the Western United States (a site where forest fires and floods are also happening), and I notice erosion blockers lining nearly every hillside. Mesh sleeves stuffed with straw slowly decompose, reshaping Earth’s subtle contours. I am interested in the conflation of this type of band-aid-erosion-control with the permanence of fresco within architecture and painting. Impermanence exists wherever city planners, builders, and construction teams cannot control the ground. There are temporary fixes all over the landscape.

Jessica Langley (b. 1981, USA) is a multimedia artist. She has exhibited her work internationally, and has been an artist-in-residence in numerous programs including Skaftfell Center of Visual Art in Iceland, Askeaton Contemporary Art in Ireland, the SPACES World Artist Program in Cleveland, and the Digital Painting Atelier at OCAD-U in Toronto. She was a recipient of the J. William Fulbright Scholarship for research in Iceland, and earned her MFA from Virginia Commonwealth University in 2008. She is an amateur mycologist, and her artwork and writing have been published in the New York Mycological Society Newsletter, New American Paintings, NPR, Hyperallergic, and Temporary Art Review.