SF/Arts Curator Insight

Refrain is a contronym. The verb means to stop oneself from acting; the noun refers to a phrase that is often repeated. This apt title captures the obsessive tension in Jessie Henson's boundary breaking work, which tears through contemporary art's distinction between fine art and craft as vehemently as her industrial sewing machine plows through paper. The result is bent sculpture warped by thick fields of lustrous thread that evoke the intimate and the aerial. A moment of time. Earth from above.