GLASGOW.- Jessica Ramm’s films, sculptures and performances explore the relationships between humans, the environment and technology. Resembling imaginary sets or curious experiments, her works convey a sense of material translation, often involving reconfigurations of objects and materials drawn from nature. Alluding to mythological themes as well as our everyday environment, her immersive installations investigate different notions of space and matter.

Her research consists of a series of ongoing, sometimes haphazard experiments which examine contemporary civilizations ordering of nature through technology and science, often contrasted against the environmental forces of the natural world. This is reinforced by the allusion to different orders of time in her works, which juxtapose themes of day to day life with long term, geological and cosmic events.

For Tramway Jessica presents new sculptural works that extend her research into the mobility and resistance of matter. Presenting documentation of her performances in which she uses her own body to manipulate the environment, alongside objects lifted from nature such as a large erratic boulder.

The boulder is exhibited on the pallet used to transport it. Originally excavated from a glacial gorge in Angus the boulder has been on various journeys and previously presented in different exhibition spaces. Ramm is interested in how the rock retains its personality and authenticity as an object even when dislodged from its natural environment, resisting relegation to the status of an archive object. By loosening it from the landscape in which it has previously existed, it encounters change at a rate which is much faster and more frequent than the geological changes of its natural landscape. Thus this work reiterates Ramm’s interest in the juxtaposition of horological time, describing the study and measurement of time by humans and prehistoric or geological notions of time.

Much of Ramm’s work is concerned with the boundaries between manmade and natural environments. Tar being a material which is used to seal the gaps and cracks between our built environment and the earth. Ramm is interested in this as a substance which subdues or contains the surface beneath it but also the idea that it is both a solid and a liquid. The tar in the space is never truly static and is slowly but imperceptibly moving, referencing Pitch Glacier , the work of revolutionary scientist Lord Kelvin which is one of the world’s oldest continuously running experiments (dating from 1887) which monitors the flow of tar down a staircase over centuries.

The films on display show two of Ramm’s recent performances which she carries out in the landscape. Described as experiments, her performances often convey the artist trying to achieve something ridiculous or impossible, in this case creating clouds and inverting a piece of earth using her body. The sense of exertion in her performances and in the creation of her large scale works, sets up a tension between forces which are under and out with our control, ultimately evoking landscapes which are both interior and exterior to the human body.

Jessica Ramm (b. 1987, Lambeth, Scotland) graduated from Duncan & Jordanstone College of Art in 2009 and completed a Master of Fine Arts with distinction from Edinburgh College of Art in 2014. Jessica received the R.S.A Sculpture Prize (2010), the Scottish Sculpture Workshop residency award (2009) and was selected as a Saatchi New Sensations finalist in 2014. She has undertaken numerous residencies including: the Graduate Residency at Hospitalfield Arts, Arbroath (2014); Sabhal Mòr Ostaig Visual Artists residency, Isle of Skye (2011); R.S.A. Residencies for Scotland (2011); and spent time in Italy on the R.S.A John Kinross Scholarship.

Recent exhibitions include: Saatchi New Sensations , London (2014); Remote Possibilites , Timespan, Sutherland (2014); Convocation , part of Colm Cille's Spiral , Glasgow School of Art, Glasgow (2013); R esident 13 , Royal Scottish Academy, Edinburgh (2013).

Jessica Ramm lives and works in Edinburgh.