Ikon gallery is a partner in National Treasures - a scheme led by London's National Gallery to send master paintings on loan to galleries around the country. Ikon is exhibiting a masterpiece by Artemisia Gentileschi (1593-1654 or later): Self Portrait as Saint Catherine of Alexandria (about 1615-17).

Complementing the work is a solo exhibition by contemporary artist Jesse Jones, who uses film, sound sculpture and performance to transform the gallery space, preparing visitors for an 'encounter' with the Gentileschi painting.

What's On spoke to Jones, to discover her inspiration behind the exhibition:

"I became really obsessed with her story and with her as a character, but I hadn’t really seen any of her works in the flesh until I saw Self Portrait as Saint Catherine of Alexandria at the National Gallery. It just had this incredible presence, when you see the piece in real life, and it feels like it’s a live work, it feels like it’s a performance, because the representation of her body just feels so realistic like you’re in the room with her. It’s really exciting for her to come to Birmingham - it really does feel like she’s a character that is arriving in Birmingham as a person."

The exhibition, entitled Mirror Martyr Mirror Moon, begins with a ritual threshold space, featuring sacred waters collected from wells in Ireland - Jones' homeland. Jones draws from folk tradition surrounding the Saints, in parallel with Gentileschi's self portrait as Saint Catherine.

"I like saints, because they are a little bit strange - they are these magical bodies that are capable of doing really extraordinary things."

"When we come to the next space, the curtain will kind of guide you into a much more quiet, dark space, with some sound and lighting elements, and that’s where you’ll find the Gentileschi. It’s really priming people for a very intimate encounter with the painting. Whenever we see it in the National Gallery, it’s full of people and the room is really bright, and there’s a Carravaggio on the other side. She really holds her own in that space, but it’s also this framing of her in a more intimate space, it’s about having a really intimate encounter with Gentileschi."

"One thing that’s important to the work is that when I started researching Saint Catherine, I realised that the story of Saint Catherine is based on an actual woman called Hypatia of Alexandria, who was an incredible mathematician, philosopher and astronomer, who lived in Alexandria in the 5th Century AD, and was very violently, publicly killed, for her disagreement about the calendar of the easter period. She was a Pagan, and she was murdered by a mob of Christians. So what we see in Saint Catherine is a kind of ‘through the looking glass’ mirror image of that, where we see Saint Catherine as a Christian martyr, who was murdered by Pagans."

"So the story at the heart of Mirror Martyr Mirror Moon, there’s this sense of the recurring martyr image through histories of women’s experience, through Gentileschi herself and her experience of violence and resistance, through Saint Catherine, the saint who was very famously martyred, and was really persecuted for her intellectual rigour, and then the actual origin story which is Hypatia. So there’s three female portraits in the one portrait - Gentileschi, Hypatia, and Saint Catherine, are all in the centre of that work."

"You don’t need to know all of this going in, but I hope that people will have an experience of an intimate relationship with the Gentileschi painting looking directly at you as a viewer."

The final space features a 16mm film, which Jones describes as 'a cartographic opera'.

"We’ve based the opera score sound on that mountain range, to kind of land it there spatially. Also, we’ll be using some works that were contemporary to Gentileschi - Monteverdi’s Addio Roma is going to be remixed with Francesca Caccini… we're dealing with what would have been the sound landscape in the mid 17th century, around the time that Gentileschi was working - what would have been the sounds that she would have heard inside of her studio."

Artemisia in Birmingham and Mirror Martyr Mirror Moon are at Ikon Gallery from Fri 10 May until Sun 8 September.