HAVEN

A two-month duo artist residency project with artist Yoko Ozawa, exploring the notion of havens. The residency took place at correspondences in Bulleke-bek (Brunswick) and was curated by Emma Thomson.

Yoko and Jessye are alumni artists in residence at correspondences, and the project title took inspiration from Yoko’s ongoing sculpture series of the same name, 吹き溜りFukidimari - a bank of fallen leaves, first shown at the gallery during her residency in 2023. Emma writes, ‘While the literal translation of fukidimari is a “bank of fallen leaves”, it can also be understood to mean a haven or gathering place for outsiders’.

Haven featured a series of new and existing works, including ink drawing and sculpture by Yoko; and embroidery, sculpture and drawing by Jessye.

As Emma notes, a haven can encompass ‘physical places, processes, practices, rituals, objects, materials, and relations that provide safety, refuge and sanctuary for our bodies and minds’.

For the residency, Jessye developed several new embroideries, continuing a recent exploration of textiles as a medium. These works explore a poetic language that embraces the irregularities of the hand while engaging with the exacting nature of pattern, repetition and abstraction. Although geometric, the works gesture to place and landscape, enduring themes in Jessye’s practice. Their use of the grid also reference the woven mesh of nets and textiles, evoking a sense of containment while simultaneously remaining permeable, resisting neat boundaries. Created during a period of injury, the embroideries offered the artist a means to continue making work while her body recovered, particularly through a medium that allows for picking up and putting down. The repetitive act of embroidering became a type of haven for the artist.

In the second half of the residency, Jessye introduced two watercolours which drew directly on a period she recently spent in London, specifically on the River Thames foreshore. This is a site of return for Jessye, both creatively and as a place of unexpected peace and enchantment. One of the works also responds to her experience of a deep partial solar eclipse during this time. Both watercolours gesture to the shifting tones and colours of the waters of the Thames, an underlying grid structure and, through the incorporation of text, to a shared love of concrete, shape and visual poetry that Yoko and Jessye explored during the residency.  

The residency also provided an opportunity to share a series of small sculptural pieces Jessye developed during her collaborative artist residency with Ouyang Yu at correspondences in 2023. Cast in bronze from seashells found along Frankston foreshore on walks with her parents, the works were conceived as talismanic objects, holding a sense of connection to the beach and ocean as a place of refuge and haven.

Haven took place from 4 July—29 August 2026.

This residency project took place on the country of the Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung peoples of the Kulin Nation. All involved in the project respectfully acknowledge them as the Sovereign Custodians of the land and waters upon which we live and work. The artists wish to pay their respect to their Elders, past and present, and extend this respect to all First Peoples.