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Jesse Darling, No Medals No Ribbons, installation view at Modern Art Oxford, 2022. Photo: Ben Westoby. Modern Art Oxford.

Meet the Turner Prize artist shortlist: Jesse Darling  

As Education Partner for the Turner Prize 2023, the world’s leading prize for contemporary art, we will be taking a deep dive into the artist shortlist announced in April of this year. We invite you to join us over the following weeks and meet each of the artists. 

Did you know, two University of Sussex alumni have previously won the Turner Prize. Mixed-media artist Helen Cammock, a Sussex sociology graduate, was one of the co-winners of the 2019 prize. And conceptual artist, Jeremy Deller, who holds a British Art History and Critical Theory MA from Sussex, won the Turner Prize in 2004. 

The shortlisted artists for this year’s Turner Prize 2023 are; Jesse Darling, Ghislaine Leung, Rory Pilgrim and Barbara Walker. This week we are shining a spotlight on Jesse Darling. 

Meet Jesse Darling 

Jesse Darling was born in Oxford in 1981. Darling studied at Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London and completed an MFA at Slade School of Fine Art, University College London in 2014. In 2021, he released his first collection of poetry, Virgins, Monitor Books (Salford, UK). Jesse Darling is 41 and lives and works in Berlin. 

Darling works in sculpture, installation, video, drawing, sound, text and performance, using a ‘materialist poetics’ to explore and reimagine the everyday technologies that represent how we live.

Darling was nominated for his solo exhibitions No Medals, No Ribbons at Modern Art Oxford and Enclosures at Camden Art Centre. No Medals, No Ribbons was the largest presentation of the artist’s work to date, in which a freewheeling series of consumer goods, liturgical devices, construction materials, fictional characters and mythical symbols – detached from their own taxonomies and standing in for bodies – proposed alternative ways of thinking and being. A rickety full-sized roller coaster, bent into the skeletal form of a woolly mammoth, evoked parallel histories of extraction, leisure and the museum; an army of plastic bags for cheap chain stores marched in place on steel legs like soldiers; mobility aids, bent into strange shapes, slump and crawl across the floor.

Darling was the fourth recipient of the Camden Art Centre Freelands Lomax Ceramics Fellowship and the resulting exhibition Enclosures was the culmination of research developed over two years. The exhibition title references the historic Inclosures Act, by which the common lands of Britain were made private property by a ruling class. Darling used his fellowship to explore the histories of extraction, exhumation, property and territory, and to consider clay as a material formed from the architectural, ancestral, cultural, and corporeal bodies of our material world. 

Be part of this year’s Turner Prize 

Visit the exhibition featuring the shortlisted artists at the gallery, Towner Eastbourne, just a short trip along the coast: Opens 28 September 2023. The winner will be announced on December 5 2023 at an award ceremony in Eastbourne’s Winter Gardens.

Teams from across the University have also been collaborating with Towner Eastbourne on an inspiring arts education programme. This will include events on campus at the Attenborough Centre for the Creative Arts (ACCA), more information coming soon!