Born 1969
Lives London
Remarkable: Iggy Fatuse, Human Firefly
2007
Silkscreen print on campaign poster paper
106x157cm
Courtesy the artist
Janice Kerbel’s mellifluous radio play Nick Silver Can’t Sleep (2006) is the outcome of many months’ research into insomnia. Findings from academic investigation and individual case studies, compressed into a swooning dialogue between nocturnal plants, convey the frustrating, enervating, even psychotic, depths of sleeplessness. Such expressions of desire recur throughout Kerbel’s work. 15 Lombard Street (2001), for instance, was an exhaustive manual on how to rob a particular branch of Coutts & Co. But whether she’s envisaging a bank job, a garden for agoraphobics, an imaginary Pacific island or a good night’s sleep, Kerbel finds a form for each proposition that is never sullied by becoming physical fact. (SO’R)
