The End! by Jess Taylor & A process of 99 glasses by Shirley Jianzhen Wu.
Jess Taylor
Jess Taylor is an early career artist who lives and works on Kaurna land. Taylor's work explores her fascination with fictional horror through primarily digital methods of making, with a focus on concepts of the monstrous, voyeurism, and depictions of female brutality, sadism, and masochism. Taylor sees horror as a genre that interrogates and reveals our darkest cultural norms, and whose women offer powerful tales of suffering, empowerment and retribution. Graduating with honours from Adelaide Central School of Art in 2013, Taylor completed a Masters by Research in 2018. Taylor has exhibited nationally, holding solo exhibitions in a number of galleries including FELTspace, Seventh gallery and Hugo Michell gallery. She has been a finalist and awardee in several art prizes and was an ACE studio resident in 2019. Taylor currently works out of her home studio and lectures at Adelaide Central School of Art.
“But Grandmother! What big eyes you have!” said Little Red Riding Hood. “All the better to see you with, my dear,” replied the Wolf.
In Charles Perrault’s 17th century version of Little Red Riding Hood, the wolf in grandma’s clothing jumps out of bed and eats the girl. The End. A century later, the Brothers Grimm offer a different conclusion: a huntsman comes to the rescue, using his axe to cut the wolf’s stomach open to free the girl and her grandmother.
Although Jess Taylor doesn’t explicitly reference this fairy tale in her work, her exhibition The End! could be read as a compelling alternative ending to the story. In that version, perhaps the wise and protective mother sees exactly what’s coming for Little Red. After ceremoniously beheading the wolf, her children parade triumphantly through the woods with the wolf’s eyeballs skewered upon a staff. All the better to see you with, my dear.
Taylor’s work contemplates the nature of endings, and the entanglement of horror and hope that surrounds any final act. The end of the world, the end of a relationship, the end of innocence, the end of life, the end of the story. She draws from her personal experiences of loss, translating these into a rich and mysterious language of symbolism that nods to powerful feminine archetypes in literature and art history. The eyeballs, for example, recall representations of Saint Lucy, who gouged out her own eyes rather than being forced to marry a pagan—mutilating herself in her quest to self-determine the ending of her story.
Wolves feature in Taylor’s work as representations of desire and hunger—the things that women are often denied or punished for experiencing. She also draws inspiration from Bernini’s famously horny marble sculpture The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa (1647-1652) and illustrations of Scylla, the ravenous female monster of Greek mythology who is sometimes represented with a skirt of wolves around her lower half.
Little Red Riding Hood is commonly interpreted one dimensionally, as a sexual allegory intended to warn innocent girls about the dangers of smooth-talking strangers. (As if Little Red doesn’t get hungry herself sometimes.) In The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales (1976), however, Bruno Bettelheim recasts the story in terms of Freudian analysis, with the motif of the huntsman cutting open the wolf as a “rebirth” that allows the girl to be reborn as a new person.
It is this more complex and nuanced understanding of endings that echoes through Taylor’s work. In Strangers, the artist depicts herself as a dead body, a new version of herself being reborn from a gaping wound in her stomach. In this scenario, she is at once the wolf, the hunter and Little Red Riding Hood. Moving fluidly between the roles of protagonist, villain and saviour, it is clear there can never be one single, immutable ending for such a multi-faceted creature. Rather, Taylor’s figures are ripe for re-interpretation, exploring all the terrible and wonderful possibilities that might follow.
THE END.
Dr Chelsea Nichols
Dr Chelsea Nichols is a curator and art historian whose expertise is in the strange and dark corners of art history, where monstrous things lurk.
Shirley Jianzhen Wu
Born in the Cantonese region of China, Shirley Jianzhen Wu is an emerging artist based in Adelaide. Wu’s multidisciplinary practice is centred around the transmigratory experience (hers and others), holistic healing and meditative processes. Through glass forms, jewellery, installation, performative actions, videos and audio, Wu reflects a tension in her life: growing up in a Chinese patriarchal family and an evolving feminist awareness as an Asian immigrant.
Wu completed a Master of Design (Contemporary Art) at the University of South Australia (2019). Previously she studied a Bachelor of Arts in Jewellery & Accessories at Middlesex University, England (2009–2013). Wu is the recipient of Pilchuck Glass School Scholarship (2024), Guildhouse Catapult Mentorship Program (2024), Nexus Arts Studio Residency (2023), Sauerbier House Artist in Residence (2023), Canberra Glassworks Graduate in Residence (2022), Brighton Jetty Emerging Artist award (2022) and SALA Festival City Rural Emerging Artist award (2021). She was a finalist for the Fuse Glass Prize (2022), the MilanoVetro-35 (2020) and the National Emerging Art Glass Prize (2020). Wu was a Co-Director at FELTspace from 2022 to 2024.
HEALING AT A DISTANCE.
Shirley Jianzhen Wu is an artist whose creative practice speaks to personal truths and universal experiences, inviting audiences to relate through a process of affective recognition. She is part of a generation of first-generation Asian Australian artists whose works grapple with the complexities of migration, and the feelings of inner displacement that occur when you live an embodied experience from a place of in-betweenness. This is a truth that I know well.
The exhibition A process of 99 glasses is the culmination of Wu’s thinking around the lingering effects of Chinese patriarchal structures on her perspectives as a Cantonese woman. Within these long-established patriarchal structures, which are also shaped by Confucianism, sons are privileged over daughters, and women are expected to serve a subservient role in the family. While Wu’s prior exhibitions have broadly explored themes centred on healing (influenced largely by her prior study of aromatherapy and clinical massage), this is the first time that she has tackled these topics of patriarchal control head on. This is an exciting new direction for Wu’s practice.
The lingering influence of healing practices remains evident, however, in Wu’s ambitious glass sculptural installation. In the exhibition’s titular work Wu has created more than 99 hand-blown glass vessels that take visual cues from ancestral containers – the type used for ritual purposes. Wu shares that historically, women in her family were not allowed to participate in these patriarchal ancestral ceremonies, and her later participation was offered with the caveat of gratefulness and gratitude. Rather than working from a close visual study, Wu has relied on her memory – with all its unreliability – to recreate the bell-like forms, bringing a personal inflection to their interpretation.
Alongside the glass sculpture, Wu has also experimented with sound and performance works to centre an embodied perspective. Wu’s voice can be heard clearly in the audio work 哦, as she repeats the verbal cue “awh” – commonly used to indicate submission and acceptance. The last work in the exhibition is an exercise in transience, whereby Wu writes with water on a panel, in a manner reminiscent of Chinese artist Song Dong. This turn to an embodied practice, and using the body as a means of art-making, is in part inspired by Wu’s mentorship with the artist Jingwei Bu, who encouraged Wu to consider the use of the body as a ‘final material.’ These two works add another layer of agency and autonomy to the exhibition.
The works in 99 glasses can only be made from distance; the meaning they glean comes in part from the contentious relationship the artist has to the concept of home and her relationship to family from oceans apart – and this relationship is still evolving. Wu admits to me that part of the exhibition’s goals is to offer herself some healing from decades of individual suppression, and a path forward from the conflation of familial love with control. As much as these works derive from tension, they also reveal the artist’s own autonomy and attempts to heal.
Sophia Cai
Sophia Cai 蔡晨昕 is a curator and writer based in Naarm/Melbourne, Australia. She is the current Artistic Director of Bus Projects, one of Australia’s longest running artist-run organisations, while maintaining an independent curating and writing practice.