Jessica Webster (b. 1981, South Africa) is a conceptual painter whose work is complex in range of theme and materiality. From her first solo show I knew you in this dark at David Krut Projects in 2009, through to her solo shows at Goodman Gallery Murderer 2015 and Wisteria in 2017, Webster has pursued ideas about traumatic memory and the human predicament for sense-making as having a defamiliarizing effect on the almost mundane visual realities of daily experience. Webster’s philosophical approach to painting originated in her PhD in Philosophy (Wits, 2017). Her research was co-supervised by artist Penny Siopis, whose lasting mentorship of Webster led to the development of a close analysis of Siopis’s practice regarding trauma, objecthood, and the embodied "sexuality’’ of the painted surface. Webster’s ideas address painting as re-articulations of psycho-somatic events which reveals painting at its most robust: where it lays bare the aesthetic ideals of the enlightenment project as traumatic. Webster’s current painting (2018-2020) exerts itself as a detachment from the traumatic underpinnings of that thesis towards a new experiment with lightness and irony. But for Webster, the theme of each body of work lies adjacent to achieving the unresolvable power that painting has to deeply move the individual and collective. In that way, painting plays a quiet yet containing social role in the arts and for the public. Her work is held in private and public institutions locally and internationally and has been reviewed by critical authors such as Amie Soudien, Same Mdluli and Dave Mann.