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​


"...her crystalline soprano [is] as controlled as the marine exhalation is wild... she is a solo prima donna. At times, she sings in harmony with her identical twin. But she also multiplies to become a female collective, at once Amazonian army, Greek chorus and Baroque choir... Then Lamprea’s voice starts to fracture. Ultimately she and her sisters are so enraptured they could be speaking in tongues."

(Rachel Spence, Financial Times, May 2024)

https://www.ft.com/content/603254be-d65b-446e-ade8-013d0a0c2f5a​

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​"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
Choreography: Megan Kennedy & Jessica Kennedy, Junk Ensemble
Costume: Roisin Gartland & Alison Conneely
Hair and makeup: Natalie Kinsella
​Photo stills: Mark Duggan
Producers: Zlata Filipović & Anna Rodgers, Invisible Thread Films
Demo reel: Campbell Parker