Mirror Martyr Mirror Moon
A film installation created by Jesse Jones
Stephanie Lamprea, performer

On display at the Ikon Gallery 10 May - 8 September 2024
Exhibition information here

Mirror Martyr Mirror Moon (2024) is a new 16mm film in response to Artemisia Gentileschi's Self Portrait as Saint Catherine of Alexandria (about 1615-17), which is on loan at the Ikon Gallery in Birmingham celebrating the National Gallery’s Bicentenary, NG200. The film is a cartographic operatic based on the landscape of Mount Sinai, where the body of St Catherine was mystically elevated after her martyrdom. The film includes a score composed by Irene Buckley, starring Colombian American singer Stephanie Lamprea, and featuring the music of Francesca Caccini, a friend and contemporary of Gentileschi. This film holds a powerful space for healing and contemplation with Gentileschi’s Self Portrait as Saint Catherine of Alexandria invoked, in the words of Jones, as a “triple headed goddess”.

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Press

"...the heart of Jones’s conception is a mesmerising film of Colombian-American soprano Stephanie Lamprea... The sound (and vision) is stunning, harrowing, agonising, sonorous and then garbled, stoppered, and running, as it seems, backwards."

(Laura Cumming, The Observer, May 2024)

https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/article/2024/may/12/artemisia-in-birmingham-jesse-jones-mirror-martyr-mirror-moon-dion-kitson-rue-britannia-review-reshaping-art-history​


"Lamprea’s entrancing voice resonates throughout the dark gallery, activating the space with a mix of operatic clarity and improvised guttural dissonance, almost as if her words were being regurgitated. There is a sense of deep, psychological struggle here."

(David Trigg, Religion Unplugged, July 2024)

https://religionunplugged.com/news/2024/7/17/artemisia-in-birmingham-a-contemporary-artist-responds-to-a-baroque-masterpiece

​Credits

Creator and director: Jesse Jones
Vocals and acting: Stephanie Lamprea
Director of photography: Emma Dalesman
FIlm score: Irene Buckley
Sound Design: Mark Murphy
Costume: Roisin Gartland and Alison Conneely
Hair and makeup: Natalie Kinsella
Demo reel: Campbell Parker