Katerina Jebb was born in England in 1962.
After studying drama at St Anne's College, she moved to California to study
photography. Her first works were photomontages which she created
inside the camera, originating from repeated exposure of a single
roll of film.
In 1989 Jebb relocated to Paris and worked for the French newspaper
Liberation. In 1991 she was involved in a car accident which
paralyzed her right arm. To resolve the inability to hold a camera,
Jebb began to employ machines to make life-size images, primarily
self-portraits lying herself down on a high resolution scanning machine.
Progressively, she diversified, posing subjects and objects,
exploring the medium in parallel with the expanding possibilities in digital technology.
Jebb proceeded to remove parts of the scanner to facilitate maximum extension
of the subject. The duration of each passage of the scanner echoed early photographic
principles, being seven minutes long, therefore demanding of the sitter to lie motionless
for 28 minutes.
The resulting images, suspended and life like were embraced as a new visual
medium and began to appear in Museums and Galleries, notably
The Whitney Museum as part of The Warhol Look (1998), a world touring
retrospective. Her early work was published in Life Magazine, The Times and Vogue.
Jebb's work has flourished from its photographic origins, proceeding
to disrupt the boundaries between mediums. Her photography has made
way for video art, installations and sculpture. In her work, Jebb
considers the human conditon with arrant sensitivity, offering the
viewer a depiction of women that rejects the normalized, commercial
female role. Her most recent series, Simulacrum and Hyperbole
(2009-2011) offers a critique of women's representation in television and
advertising through parodic videos featuring renowned female icons.
These works simultaneously evoke laughter and pathos in their
observance of the irrationality of popular expectations of women.