The Perimeter Studio Award 2025 Recipient

Jess Heritage (b. 1993, Pontefract, West Yorkshire) works predominantly with speech and performance.

Heritage's work begins in the middle; a conversation already underway, or just out of earshot. Circling doubt, disfluency, and indeterminacy, Jess produces registers of speech which falter, defer, or fail to wholly arrive. Her performances seek to make visible the gaps and slippages that open up in communication.

Her performances take the form of scripted dialogues which tend towards deviation and interruption. Disfluent narratives unfold between performers, or from within audio-visual installations where Jess uses voice-over, live dubbing, and audio description to trouble the relationship between the live voice and the recorded image. Across performances, the script operates as a provisional guide rather than a stable framework, and is consistently misheard, undermined, and gradually led off course.

She often works with provisional materials building stripped-back, precarious architectural structures which exist in states of assembly or disassembly. These structures, like her register of speech, are understated and continually unresolved.

Jess graduated with an MA in Fine Art Media from the Slade School of Fine Art in 2025. Recent exhibitions include Chilli Art Projects, ANNEX by the Koppel Project, St Saviour’s Church, Netil House, and Barbican Arts Group Trust.

"Over the past year, The Perimeter Studio Award programme has been a backbone to my practice. It’s functioned as a kind of scaffolding, an essential support structure while I’ve been figuring out how to navigate what “being an artist” actually means.The award has given me not only the means to continue my practice, but a stronger sense of how I want to sustain it moving forward. I’m incredibly grateful for the opportunity and I’m so excited that the programme will continue to make a significant difference to future recipients of the award." - Jess Heritage