Berlin-based, Oxford-born artist Jesse Darling believes in community but openly reckons with Western colonial history, artistic appropriation and the ugliness of modern manufacture. Darling won the 2023 Turner Prize—one of the art world’s most prestigious awards since its inception in 1984—for his sculptures built from ordinary objects like Union Jack bunting and pedestrian barriers. He’s in good company, as past winners of the prize presented to an artist born or working in Britain include Anish Kapoor, Steve McQueen, Wolfgang Tillmans and Grayson Perry.
Darling, who studied at London’s Central Saint Martins and Slade School of Fine Art, was awarded the prize for his solo exhibitions “No Medals, No Ribbons” (his largest show to date) and “Enclosures”, which were presented at Modern Art Oxford and Camden Art Centre respectively. He’s known for artistic output that elevates everyday objects: what was cheap, free or easily accessible in the realm of man-made materials like steel, plastic and silicone. Darling completes his creative thinking with a lot of reading, under the imperative to understand and situate what humanity has done and reaped.
Observer spoke with the artist about reimagined fairytales, having lived-in experiences with objects and saying no to the traditional studio visit.
They always say that my work is about identity. To which I would say: everyone’s work is about identity, not mine in particular. It’s just the dog whistle. I’m not a conceptual artist, so I don’t work from concept. I work more or less site-specifically. If I’m making some public output, it’s like, Well, where’s the show gonna happen? Who’s likely to see it? In this case, it was the most public show I was ever going to have in the UK. It’s also the only show that I’m ever going to have in the UK that the public has any kind of stake in. For that reason, I wanted to make something that was very accessible to that public—and I genuinely believe that the work is accessible. The trolls don’t think so; they think it’s a bunch of rubbish that alienates people, but then they say that about everything, which is fine. I think that literally anyone with any amount of educational knowledge, or none, can walk into that and see something that will be a correct read.
It’s not that deep. In some ways, it’s really unsubtle. If you’re talking about the UK and you are talking about Brexit, land enclosure, coloniality, the necrotic empire… that’s part of what that country is right now. It’s not that my work is about Brexit. I am interested in telling fairy tales back: the fairy tales that we grew up with as naturalized meta-narratives—things are this way or that way. I want to tell them back as fairy tales so that the completely arbitrary, constructed nature of things becomes apparent.
I think about everything and read about things and care about things and what I say to my students is: what you’ve been reading and what you’ve been living and what you think about is in the work. There’s no need to insert it as a concept; it’s in there. I would say the same of this work. I study a bunch of things at the same time. I’m not very interested in art at the moment. I have a reading group. We’re reading a lot of Palestinian authors. Before that, the Black radical tradition: Sylvia Winter, Frantz........