About Jessica Rique

Jessica Rique is a French mixed-media artist based in London. In 2020 she obtained her BA in Fine Art from Central Saint Martins. Rique works predominantly with photography,  painting, drawing and objet trouvés. In 2019, she was awarded the Hollyport Capital Runner Up Prize for Innovation, presenting an installation called They Will Find You, which gathered photographs and objets trouvés. She has also been nominated for the Dean's Collection Award at the end of her final year studying at Central Saint Martins, which presented two of her photographic works: Expression Altérée and I Will See You On The Street.  In 2020 she also participated in the Nooderlicht Photo Festival: Student Open Call in the Netherlands and has been included in the Glasgow Gallery of Photography group exhibition The Black Edition. Rique is currently focusing on mixed-media installations, combining two of her favourite mediums: photography and the found object.

Jessica Rique chooses bold shapes and photographs to tell stories. Developing portraits of the cities and of the mind, the recurrent subjects she works with are time, nostalgia, the uncanny, animism and objecthood. She is obsessed with shapes, an interest that manifests itself in an aesthetic that combines industrial elements and nature. She seeks to make the audience engage with new perspectives. 

Her practice regularly refers to the aura and how it allows individuals to connect with the uncanny. The titles used often romanticise the narratives and contrast with the absence of a human figure, yet enhance the inhuman element within the works. Rique’s work is a reflection of passing time, interpreting the found object as a gift offered by the city, allowing the artist to interrogate the effect of passing time on different materials – similar to an archival process. The process is about looking at things changing, becoming less and more familiar, and about what cities have to say and allow us to see, if we are given the opportunity to see it.