“I was born in Jacksonville, Florida, USA, half Puerto Rican and half white.

The majority of the year was spent playing volleyball with the roof behind the house where alligators lived in the pond, and in October, vultures sunned their wings on its banks. When the ocean was warm, my favorite place was the beach. I spent summers in Cottonwood, Alabama, where I learned to fish with my grandfather. My grandfather always dressed in his signature boots and a cowboy hat. In summers, we would pluck up all the pecans that had fallen from the trees and take them down to the pecan processing facility where we got cash to spend on a dollar burger from McDonald's and fireworks.

In March 2021, my grandfather James Floyd passed away unexpectedly in Cottonwood, Alabama, in his farm house. Following this event, I have reflected on his presence in my life as the original cowboy that spurred my current and past work. I see him reflected in paintings such as “Honest and Harmless” in which I consider the temporal body as something lost and sweet. Following this, for my 25th birthday I traveled back to Jacksonville, Florida, for the first time in five years to revisit my childhood home. I visited the ocean and watched as the tide pulled away, revealing conch shells before swallowing them up just as quickly. I sprinted in and acquired my prize just before the water could reach me. I reflect on this euphoric experience in the poem “Shapeshifter” and in the painting “Florida, Florida, Florida". My practice forges a personal mythos through a cast of personas. They are characters which embody my psychosomatic experiences as a queer dreamer traversing an American landscape. In certain works, they adorn themselves in elements of American culture: cowboy hats and boots. In others, they reject this completely, lingering amongst nature as alien bodies.”

Floyd, November 2021

Jessica Floyd (b. 1996, Jacksonville, Florida, USA) graduated from The Cooper Union, NYC, USA in 2020 with a Bachelor of Fine Arts. Floyd’s recents exhibitions includes her thesis presentation at 41 Cooper Gallery, NYC, USA (2021), a group exhibition at Thorvaldsens Museum curated by pro tempore.art, Copenhagen, Denmark (2021) and the digital exhibition “Transition” (2021)