In Plasmatic Joy, Jean-François / Daisy Krebs gathers blown glass sculptures shaped like pneumatophores – modified roots growing upwards from waterlogged soil – and cast glass panels bearing botanical impressions. Water pools beneath these forms, both reflecting and fracturing. This is a space of consecration, where life, memory, nature, and self-exploration entwine and pulse together.
What unfolds is not a tidy narrative, but a system of entanglements. Nature, family history, and selfhood are here presented as codependent and unstable, colliding and cross-contaminating like overgrown roots beneath floorboards. The domestic and botanical bleed into one another. The glass pneumatophores bulge and contort between organ and plant, lung and root; their forms feel embryonic, faintly obscene, like something still in the process of deciding what kind of body to become. The cast panels, meanwhile, record flora not as scientific specimens but as ghosts – pressed textures, botanical phantoms. They are less about taxonomy than residue.
Threaded through all of this is a sustained refusal to simplify. Gender and sexuality are not foregrounded as subject matter, but they imbue the room with the quiet, persistent presence of something organic. In Krebs’ work, queerness is botanical before it is political: plants as irreverent bodies, hybridised and hermaphroditic, shape-shifting without ceremony or shame. The vegetal world becomes a model not for escape but for proliferation – identity as something fungal, mutable, entangled, grown sideways rather than in a line. It doesn’t need to explain itself. It simply spreads.
Plasmatic Joy is not an elegy but a living system – half-crumbling, half-regenerating. For Krebs, family, nature, and selfhood are processes subject to seepage, collapse, and feral reconfiguration. The domestic becomes botanical; the botanical becomes bodily. Glass is not merely a material but a membrane: luminous and vulnerable.
Jean-François / Daisy Krebs Plasmatic Joy 13th September – 25th October Sherbet Green
* Saturday 13th September Celebratory opening reception 4PM–8PM, with music and drinks at the Queensrollahouse rooftop bar. The artist will be giving tours of the exhibition at 4.30PM and 6.30PM. All welcome!
About the artist
Jean-François Krebs (b. Metz, France) currently lives and works in France. Their interdisciplinary practice spans installation, performance, sculpture, video, and weaving, informed by training in landscape architecture at the Edinburgh College of Art and the École Nationale Supérieure du Paysage in Versailles, as well as horticulture at the École du Breuil in Paris. They later joined the Maumaus nIndependent Study Programme in Lisbon and participated in an exchange at the Malmö Art Academy in Sweden. Krebs completed an MFA in Fine Art at Goldsmiths, University of London in 2022. They took part in the glass residency of Fondation Martell (2021) and Strata x Arches Citoyennes, Paris (2023). They were laureate of Fluxus Art Project 2023.
Group exhibitions include Dunkirk Triennale (2023); Jour de la Terre, Gaîté Lyrique, Paris (2024); JUPITER WALK, Sherbet Green, London (2023); Primeval, Unit 1 Gallery | Workshop, London (2023); Melle Biennale, France (2018); Naturally Not Binary, IMT Gallery (2022); Crafting Ourselves, Ugly Duck (2022); Weaving Roots, Chisenhale Studios (2022); Jeune Création 72, Romainville (2022); and Cosmogonias, Galerie Municipale Jean-Collet, Vitry-sur-Seine (2022). Solo exhibitions include Trans-anéthol*, Kommet Art Space, Lyon (2023); Septuplet, The Smallest Gallery in Soho, London (2022); and Défense tactile, Le Granit, Belfort (2019).
