"My practice looks at home, though home is never just one thing. It is a word stretched thin by longing, a memory lit by the flicker of something almost familiar. It hides in the creases of a tablecloth, the smell of burnt wax, or the strange comfort of a drawer that doesn’t quite shut. For those who have been displaced, uprooted, or confined, home takes on a peculiar shimmer: a thing that is there and not there, a lighthouse and a ghost.
Jessica Ostrowicz (Birmingham, UK) is an artist and prison teacher. She studied Fine Arts in Dresden and Contemporary Art Practice with a focus on Critical Practice at the Royal College of Art in London. In her works on paper, installations, sculptures, and films, she engages with transgenerational trauma and the possibilities for processing and restitution. She reflects on themes of [be]longing and the concept of home, "understood not as a fixed or singular entity but as a shifting condition shaped by memory, longing, and displacement". Since 2022, Ostrowicz has been working in high-security men’s prisons as an art lecturer, and since March 2025 as the Artist in Residence at HMP Spring Hill, supported by the Ikon Gallery in Birmingham and the Rothschild Foundation."