Het Plafond, a space for the arts and for culture in the home of Willem Besselink and Guus Vreeburg
Gedempte Zalmhaven 761, 3011 BT Rotterdam / NL
Jessica Worden
December 16th - 30th, 2006
' "Merry Christmas, Willem and Guus!" '
Jessica Worden proposed a “seasonal event”. These words set the tone. She wanted to do a work at Het Plafond within & and referring to the holiday season. Unlike what’s usual at Het Plafond, she is not making an ‘installation’. Instead, she is organizing an ‘event’, the results of which will be on display afterwards – as her presentation to the passers-by on the sidewalk. The ‘event’ itself is a rather exclusive affair for friends, ‘on invitation only’, and almost domestic in character, with Worden herself serving as the director up to the minutest detail. Central to the event is the decoration of a Christmas tree as a collective effort.
Read Jessica Worden's proposal here
Look at pictures of the event Jessica organized
 |
 |
Jessica Worden. invitationcard to ' "Merry Christmas [...]" '
for Het Plafond, Rotterdam; November 2006
© Jessica Worden, Rotterdam; 2006
| Jessica Worden | |
| 1981 | born in Columbus, Ohio/USA |
| 2001-2006 | BA-course 'Fine Art' at Willem de Kooning Academy ('Art, media |
| & design'), Rotterdam | |
| 2005 | participant at summer project‘Re_Cultivation’, SICE / Sarajevo International |
| Cultural Exchange; Sarajevo / Bosnië en Herzegovina | |
| 2006 | participant at workshop 'Ideas Forum' by Lucy and Jorge Orta in Museum Boijmans |
| Van Beuningen, Rotterdam | |
| initiator, together with Eddy van Mourik, of 'Salon Rotte' | |
| graduation show, Groot Handelsgebouw Rotterdam | |
| participates in art project 'Reservaat Rotterdam', Landgoed De Tempel, Rotterdam-Overschie | |
| participates in group show 'Early Work', ihkv De Wereld van Witte de With, Rotterdam | |
| . |
Jessica Worden lives and works in Rotterdam; more information on her work is tobe found at her site
As an artist, Jessica Worden frequently does ‘event’-like activities. This summer, she finished a BA-course in Fine Art. She started out as an art student at the Fashion Department, but after a while decided that that offered too much of a constraint to her creativity, it being too focused on designing concepts for ready-to-wear garments. Even now, as a fine artist, she often deploys textiles as a medium, and she still makes garment-like artworks, sometimes even wearable ones – which she uses as props in small-scale domestic events. As far as I can judge, that’s where Worden’s creative talents concentrate. She seems to make little distinction between what she’s doing ‘as an artist’ and her private life. In both spheres she operates with similar, great intensity; on top of that, she makes both spheres coincide. To her, art and making art are part of her daily life, and her daily life is often used as starting point for artistic activity. She lifts small, intimate and personal aspects of her world out of their day-to-day context in order to focus attention – unobtrusively, but with great conviction. An experiment with home-made cheese – on an ecological basis – results into a sculptural installation; her contribution to an art project in a park-like garden was a video offering beautiful close up images of the movements of bees on and around their honeycomb; as her graduation project Worden presented an installation with a kitchen table, some chairs and a video monitor showing her as a model presenting garment-like textile artworks while standing on a chair in a living room, explaining the works to an invisible audience – a registration of a small performance she did during a recent edition of ‘Salon Rotte’ she organizes at her home with other artists which are her friends.
Jessica Worden: ‘ ”Merry Christmas, Willem and Guus” ‘
For Het Plafond, Jessica Worden decided to make a work for the holiday season. Het project ‘ ”Merry Christmas, Willem and Guus” ‘ consists of an more or less private ‘event’ – the visual results of which are offered as a gesture to passers by on the outside sidewalk during the two weeks of Christmas and New Year’s Eve. In her proposal for the project she focuses on the annual ritual of decorating the Christmas tree. She transposes this activity out of the circle of home and family into a self chosen circle of friends, and from the private living room into the semi-public space of Het Plafond, thereby implicitly challenging its status of either a public space or a private space. Even the tree itself is lifted out of cliché notions on its decoration – often the Christmas tree serves as a multi-layered collection of intimate traditions and memories, stored in decorations that have been collected and cherished over the years; on the other hand, Christmas trees nowadays can also be more impersonal, reflecting ephemeral trends in lifestyle design.
Jessica Worden challenges her friends – artists in Rotterdam, some of whom came here from various corners of the globe – to collectively decorate a tree with home made Christmas decorations, during an intimate evening event she organizes directly in front of Het Plafond’s huge windows; the evening comes with music, stories and ‘seasonal refreshments’. She takes inspiration from her personal memories of similar evenings from her childhood days in the US. In doing so, Jessica Worden hopes to inject new content into the traditional rituals.
No big spectacle, no brassy loudness – unobtrusive, yet with great conviction. Thus, Worden’s ‘events’ and ‘performances’ in aim and character are totally different from the event- and performance art of the 1960’s and 1970’s, which more often than not were heavily laden with political undertones: ‘the personal is political’ being the motto in those days.
Jessica Worden – just like quite a number of fello-artists originating from Rotterdam’s Willem de Kooning Academy (‘Art, media & design’) – has rediscovered events and performances as artistic media, exploring their potential once more. To Jessica Worden, things ‘personal’ and ‘intimate’, things ‘small’ and unobtrusive’ – things long been tabooed in art as having become too politically correct – have once more become worthy to be seen and enjoyed.
Jessica Worden and Het Plafond wish you a Merry Christmas and All the Best for the New Year 2007!
© Guus Vreeburg / Het Plafond, Rotterdam; 061216
| Program | |
| December 16, | |
| as of 7 pm | event (private) |
| December | |
| 17 - 30 | presentation visible from the sidewalk in front of Het Plafond |
| December 30, | |
| as of 8.30 pm | finissage of the presentation at Het Plafond; you are cordially invited to be present! |
Information
Willem Besselink: +31 6 19 4343 41
Guus Vreeburg: +31 6 4720 4750
Grandma Moses (Anna Mary Robertson; 1860-1991)
'Waiting for Santa Claus', 1960
oils on compressed wood, 12 x 16 inches