Jessica Arevalo

Click here to watch a short video of Jessica working.

Mexican artist Jessica Arévalo has been led by a curiosity for the myriad ways in which art can be conceived and thus produced. This interest took her from Mexico, to art courses in Italy and Japan, a Visual Arts Degree from Goldsmiths in London and to travel: where each culture’s artistic legacy has pushed to the forefront of her practice the pursuit of human histories, where a broken piece of crockery, a tattered scroll or the scarring of the land by walking, as in Richard Long’s A Line Made by Walking, speak more about that which exists just beyond the artistic object.

Through the process of making she has found the value in capturing the random cocktail of elements that come together at the time of creation. For her work ultimately depicts life and human fallibility, where the attempt at drawing a straight line or executing a colour transition every day for a period of time, embody her own life’s journey: with success, joy and wellbeing alongside mistakes, hardships and devastating bereavement. Her work is the attempt at perfection that highlights instead, the beauty in its imperfection.

Life is not a straight line. In every attempt at rendering it so, the human hand betrays our fallibility: it tires, jerks and hesitates as it ebbs and flows.

Life is instead a landscape with peaks and valleys, where the horizon delineates our highs and lows, our reactions and adaptations. For it is the faults that annunciate our humanity and thus express a history of living.

In Fault Lines, artist Jessica Arévalo traced her own history through a series of time periods. In each, she explores the transformations over time of the straight line into a jagged undulation, of one colour to another, and ultimately the transformation of herself, from place to place and moment to moment.

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