On Jesse Darling

Abstract

Jesse Darling, a contemporary Berlin-based artist, produces sculptures, paintings, and drawings that animate material to depict a lived experience of queerness and disability. This article highlights a recent exhibition of Darling’s as an entry point to their wide-ranging practice. Refracted through the lens of Sara Ahmed’s concept of feminist ‘willfulness’, Darling’s objects depict the body as unruly, unpredictable, and given to change, making them exciting candidates for both disability and trans studies. At a moment in contemporary art and cultural production more broadly when gender-nonconformity is signaled through an attempt to erase bodily markers of specificity, Darling insists on such specificity as the inescapability of the human experience.