LAMB presents Tendergressor, James Jessiman’s first solo exhibition in London: a series of bronze orchids born of a hunt that began on a Victorian steamship on Lake Titicaca and has not yet ended.
In 2010, Jessiman had a vivid vision of a steam cylinder engine grinding away, stationary in darkness and unclear to what it was powering. At the time he took it to represent the brain — moving and impulsive, even when asleep. Years later he found an image of the same engine shown in a book about the Yavari, a British-built warship broken down in 2766 pieces, shipped from London, hauled over the Andes in the 1860s, reconstructed, and still afloat in Puno on the highest navigable lake in the world. There he met the ship’s engineer, her captain, and later back in England, Meriel Larken, the British woman who rescued the Yavari from the Peruvian Navy and led its restoration.
Whilst in Puno he also met members of Los Indestructibles, a motorcycle club from nearby Juliaca. They told him about a group of volunteers who are said to have worked on the Yavari in the uncertain months around the collapse of Sendero Luminoso (the Shining Path), the militant group that terrorised Peru through the 1980s and 90s. According to the riders, the ship's volunteers used newly learnt skills of welding lead to steel on the ship to build motorcycles from salvaged parts.
It was their belief the machines they built ran on feeling over fuel: desire, lust, rage powering their vehicles. The group later rode north to the cloud forests of Moyobamba, Peru’s San Martin region — and world orchid capital. Taking up camp, in the ‘Ceja de Selva’ (eyebrow of the jungle), one member is said to have begun cultivating orchids on motorcycle batteries, some of which are shown here.
Whilst in Lima, he spent time with Jeannette and Tarissa Revilla, family of the late surrealist painter Carlos Revilla, a close friend of Salvador Dalí. In February 2026, Jessiman’s work was shown in Peru alongside Revilla’s early paintings and the work of Héctor Delgado as part of Jardines Mecánicos, Galeria Enlace, curated by Tarissa Revilla. He is now searching for the Mano Distante, (Distant Hand): through a tip off he received of the orchid growing splinter community said to be settled in San Martin — a group less interested in ideology than in each other.
The bronzes in Tendergressor are casts of orchids grown on batteries. In them, they show flower, machine and rumour forming into one object. Here, Jessiman takes his cue from Venetian cold-painted bronzes which became fashionable in the 19th century, often depicting field recordings of grand tours taken by young men of landed gentry. This technique, which he describes as almost fetishistic, idealising exotic locations showed experience and memory rather than the physical removing of objects. Working in the same manner leads Jessiman to mark his own sculptures as akin to ‘postcards of fantasies’. Trained in illustration, in which he also lectures, his bronzes in part illustrate story and myth — but imbued with long form research and almost journalistic urgency. In his writing, laboriously crafted bronze works appear in short fiction, seen only in quick passing by a protagonist. The object is belittled, devalued.
Also on show are the two works Gates of Desire: two oversized aluminium antennas, one a transmitter and one a receiver, first installed at either end of Sloane Street for Frieze’s Modern Nature in 2025. In 2023 his works were displayed in a solo booth presentation at NADA Miami with The Artist Room Gallery. Following leads and chasing impulse is a lifelong habit he has no desire to give up. Raised in a family of antique dealers, Jessiman grew up around the notion of the “sleeper,” — the overlooked object whose value others have missed. The same instinct drives 020-DESK-ZERO, the publishing imprint he runs single-handed, which began as a 24-hour telephone line for sound works by artists and writers and now publishes boundary pushing, forgotten fiction and poetry.
An upcoming title, set to publish in 2027 is Reinaldo Moraes’s Pornopopéia — the cult São Paulo underworld novel. Its lewd and shocking account of hedonism, translated to English (a first for the author) by Dr Jennifer Sarah Cooper, supported by Brazil’s Fundação Biblioteca Nacional fund. The hunt for its author, “the Burroughs of Brazil,” will take Jessiman to São Paulo in December then back to Peru in search of the rumoured collective whose action inspired these works on show. The search continues.