Artist talk with Melanie Jackson

On June 5, artist Melanie Jackson will present an artist talk about her research into profane and often overtly sexual medieval pilgrim badges from Dutch collections, and will present her latest book Aqueous Humours Fluid Ground.

In this artist talk, Melanie Jackson will introduce her research into overtly sexual medieval pilgrims badges, held in Dutch collections. Her project Spekyng Rybawdy introduces joyful and powerfully subversive characters from medieval times and brings them into conversation with contemporary gender politics, sexual diversity, structures of desire, social reproduction, consumption, power and State. Jackson’s work imagines alternative representational histories of social and sexual reproduction, challenging the ways in which such images may be used to uphold violences of control and exclusion.

She will also launch a recent book Aqueous Humours Fluid Ground, edited by Kirsten Sylvia Cooke, which she co-published with her project The Poorhouse Reading Rooms and Matts Gallery, London. It is a book that activates a watery mapping through practices of immersion, aquatics, time travel and the posthuman lenses of geological animal and machine vision.

This artist talk is part of the Stroom and SpaceX (Spatial Practices in Art and ArChitecture for Empathetic EXchange) partnership project.