Jess Hooks’ work seeks to solve problems and create inquiry into the arrangement of objects — and bodies — in space. She explores using a variety of materials, styles, and methodologies to create situations where both the mind and the body are being engaged. She investigates the instances where the intersections of personal identity and broader culture create social change — and, increasingly, where they fail to. Those are the big ideas.
On a practical level, she has spent her time trying to make garments fit impeccably, building sets out of salvaged oak in community gardens, running festivals across 22 cities, walking contested landscapes with a notebook, and sitting in archives where the evidence of someone’s existence has been reduced to a gap in the record. She sources materials that are often discarded and unloved — whether that’s reclaimed fabric, overlooked histories, or frameworks that stopped asking who they were built for. She is inspired by popular culture stretching the span of human civilisation, but seems to often gravitate towards the period that falls somewhere between the industrial revolution and WWII, with dabblings in the dark dungeons of 70s & 80s nightlife, the walking paths of southern England, and the non-sites of Jewish memory in Poland.
Then she puts it back together in a package that’s accessible, rigorous, fun, participatory, and ideally gives people something to think about.