Katerina Jebb opens her personal archive; imagery and narrative

«We are the subject of our own work however much we try to deny it». Self reflection in a fragment : a glimpse into the archive of artist Katerina Jebb

Katerina Jebb’s archive

The works seen here were taken from my archive and comprise fragments of my life that possibly have little meaning to anyone else other than me.

Most of the images are scans of objects, spaces, or surfaces; an apple fallen on the grave of the painter Balthus in 2011, a worn out carpet on the floor of a strange and obscure gallery in Paris, a fragment of abandoned tulle, thrown out of a window of a high rise housing block on the outskirts of Paris in 2003. Forlorn amongst a mass of depressing matter, a disembodied witness to a crime scene or a broken love affair.

Several years later when I placed it on the scanner, it curiously assumed a fetal position and thus offered itself as evidence of a memory of something that I won’t tell you about.

The artist as a subject of his own work

The naked woman suspended from an oak tree in the garden of the Duke of Windsor is Betony Vernon who posed naked for me in the cold and desolate landscape in the year 2005. I wanted to understand how it felt to be physically restrained and so I vicariously used her physicality  to mirror my own entrapment in a failing marriage.

The mirrored sunglasses are by Fendi and I present them here as a functional object of contemporaneity in stark conflict with the other images which inhabit a dysfunctional landscape.
Indirectly I am asking a question about this most vital subject matter “ the mirror “ and more tellingly of my own reflection mirrored in its surface.
We are the subject of our own work however much we try to deny it.

Katerina Jebb photographer

Katerina Jebb was born in England in 1962. In 1984 she moved to California to study photography. Her first works were photomontages, which she created inside the camera, originating from repeated exposure of a single roll of film. In 1989 Jebb relocated to Paris to pursue her interest in experimental photography. There she employed photocopy machines to create life-size images, primarily self-portraits lying herself down on a high resolution scanning machine. Progressively, she diversified, posing subjects and objects, exploring the medium in parallel with the expanding possibilities in digital technology. Katerina Jebb’s work is included in the permanent collections of The Victoria & Albert Museum, Le Musée des Arts Decoratifs Paris, Musée Réattu Arles.

Editorial Team