Jes Fernie is an independent curator, lecturer and writer. She works with galleries, visual arts organisations, universities and artists to make exhibitions, public artworks, residency projects and public programmes across the UK and abroad.
She is interested in ways that artworks are viewed, positioned and transformed by a live relationship with audiences, contexts and conditions. In 2021 she launched the Archive of Destruction, an international research project that brings together narratives around public sculpture that has been destroyed by rage, boredom, fear, greed and love. Through exhibition-making, publications and lectures, she is currently looking into the subject of failure, things undone and vulnerability in contemporary art practice.
In 2023 she curated a major contemporary sculpture exhibition at MK Gallery. She is a lecturer at Central Saint Martins in London, and visiting lecturer at universities including the RCA, Royal Academy Schools, the Slade and Goldsmiths College.