Jessica Wetherly @ Aspex, Portsmouth

Jessica Wetherly’s exhibition, Sink or Float: an Artificial Island, refers to a game in which players guess whether an object will sink or float in a jar of water, reflecting an undercurrent in the artist’s work, as a critique of boom or bust capitalist economies. The exhibition addresses the hypocrisy of our desire to extract resources unsustainably, to reap financial rewards without investing in the preservation of these resources or the ecosystems they are taken from. Through storytelling and personal reflection, Wetherly aims to restore a sense of agency, to confront contemporary challenges of ecological breakdown, creating new mythologies as a radical agent of deep, lasting change.