The Turner Prize, this year hosted at the Towner Gallery in Eastbourne, is always a curious mix of four diverse artists and ways of exhibiting their contemporary practice. There’s often a disjunct of experience and expectation when moving from one of the four gallery spaces into the next, with no curatorial or visual language connecting each of the four shortlisted artists, always making for a unique small group show. Some artists simply replicate a display of works showed in a previous exhibition elsewhere, some create a polite and mannered show of their best-of, while others confront the once-in-a-lifetime offer head on and create a new world to shock and pleasure the visiting public.



Of all the artists exhibiting this year, has done just this. Jesse Darling, who works across sculpture, drawing, text, and installation, has created a Brexity theme park of anxiety, pressure, and instability which draws from infrastructures and architectures of our urban social and civic realms. Transmogrifying inexpensive industrial objects, Darling has created a fever dream of animalistic barriers, a dystopian maypole, and anthropomorphic industry emerging from the walls.

It starts outside the gallery space. A seemingly abandoned billboard illuminates the wall it leans against, barbed wire and a commercial roller-shutter sit above the most unwelcoming of entrances. Anybody with the courage to cross that threshold then finds themselves channelled by steel crowd barriers, narrowing and directing the visitor’s path. The barriers themselves seem to not just be the mechanisms of this crowd control, but perhaps also the instigators – each has extended and elongated legs and seems to be crawling around the gallery space, threatening the humans who dare enter. Another is crawling up the wall as if trying to escape.



Darling draws from the history of land enclosure and privately managed public spaces of modern-day developments. In doing this, ideas around freedom, nature, bodies, and borders are physically tested across an installation that also dips into the domestic to think about self-control, ritual, surveillance, and labour. This gallery space is a reworking of our civic society and its physical manifestation, systems of control and power propogate the space, but they are also seen as weird, mutable, and anxious.

The body – human and non-human – is central to the works, but the others are not often identified. Hands protrude from an unfinished-plasterboard pink wall as if petrified in a moment of exchange, other humdrum materials suddenly take the appearance of life, such as a phallic candle and two bells.



Sad bunting hangs from above, splayed out from a scaffolding pole wrapped in crime-scene-like warning tape, topped with anti-pigeon spikes. It all feels like a national comedown and nobody wants to clear up the detritus. Bursting from the wall is a metal construction that looks like a wayward rollercoaster that has gone off the rails. But perhaps it’s not a downward descent of a big dipper, maybe it’s the opportunity of freedom and escape, a ladder someone else on the other side has smashed through to remind us there are ways to escape control and oppression.

The actual exit, which leads into a gallery full of works by fellow shortlisted artist Barbara Walker, is easier to navigate but no less nervous. Two concrete pillars stand as gateposts, lacework slung between weakly trying to mask the barbed wire above. But on leaving the waste land behind, it is isn’t left at the gate but continues to resonate in the mind, and out in the “real world” – the visitors’ newly primed brain and eyes will see it across every bit of urban Britain’s civic realm they go on to wander.