Teresa Gillespie: return to the borderland bends

The newly completed John Jones Project Space in Finsbury Park, London, launches with an exhibition of new works by Dublin-based artist Teresa Gillespie. Gillespie approaches the sensuous and intrusive space of touch through mixed media installations, which combine sculpture, video, photography, sound and spoken word. This will be the first solo presentation of Gillespie's work in London.

In return to the borderland bends, Teresa Gillespie revisits her longstanding engagement with borderlands. For the artist, borderlands are fluid sites where different materialities meet. They do more than meet: they conjoin, seep, perforate and contaminate one another. In the artist’s words, “borderlands are sites of entanglement where differences are constantly touching, confusing and affecting one another”. Through this process of slippage and contamination, the familiar can appear incongruous or even alien. As such, the borderlands are spaces of conflict; they simultaneously incite revulsion and pleasure, desire and disgust. Gillespie plays with these dichotomies, bringing together objects that create a mutual force of attraction and repulsion.

Gillespie draws upon a wide array of references from literature, film theory, philosophy, the internet, and everyday encounters. A phrase, object or image can become a starting point. Like much of Gillespie’s practice, return to the borderland bends responds to the particularities of the John Jones Project Space. The artist weaves together disparate elements into environments that are navigated by the viewer: spaces are formed between objects and between incongruous materials. The outcome is an intimate installation that plays with the visitor's physical and emotional encounter with different materialities that induce a heightened level of sensory perception.

Teresa Gillespie has had solo exhibitions in her home town of Dublin and internationally. Recent exhibitions include rogue occupation (part of the ongoing project Stalking an Ungrounded Earth), for Art Lot, 2013, inside an outside (tracing the shadows of a strange attractor), 2013, Residencia Corazon, Buenos Aires, among objects, 2012, The Joinery, Dublin, and along the borderland bends, 2011, The Return Gallery, Dublin. She has undertaken numerous residencies, most notably Frankfurter Kunstverein Deutsch Borse Program, 2008, and has been the recipient of many prestigious awards including the Wexford Arts Centre Emerging Artist Award, 2013, the Arts Council Ireland Visual Arts Bursary Award, 2012, The RCA Society and Thames and Hudson Prize, 2006, and Scottish Arts Council Lottery Grant, 2002. Gillespie graduated from Glasgow School of Art in 2001 and received her Master of Arts from the Royal College of Art in London in 2006.