Turning things upside down. Getting to know Jessica Warboys (2020 and onwards), a queer angle.

CHAPTER 1: PARASOLS AND MASKS

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• Documentation and stills from Thunderclap (2012) by Jessica Warboys. Performance, approximately 40 minutes. Performed 9 and 10 June 2012 as part of ↗︎ dOCUMENTA (13) Karlsauepark, Kassel, Germany. The film is Super 16 mm film transfer to HD, 4:00 minutes, shown as a a short excerpt. Camera by Ville Piippo; sound by Morten Norbye Halvorsen; assistant Ieva Kabašinskaitė. Performers are Henna Vainio and Elina Vainio. It is in part inspired by the dancer and artist Hélène Vanel. See ↗︎ Vanelephant publication (Sternberg Press, 2012) for more information.

Karmaklubb*: After watching Thunderclap, one of my first verbal impulses were: ‘Fake Hawaiian parasols will never be the same again!.’ I’ve known your name for years, but when I first found an entrance — a doorway — there’s no return. It took a lot of digging to become aware that some elements act almost as protagonists, reoccurring in a related form, perhaps with a slightly different ‘temper’, but telling a story along the way through your work. In this specific piece it’s even a person explored: the dancer and artist Hélène Vanel (1898–1989), often associated with Surrealism, but even her existence as an individual, as an outsider and ‘forgotten’ prominent creator, but not in any sense to consider a ‘victim’ as such, just a bit … early out. Let’s start right on. You were my entrance to Vanel; what was yours?

Jessica: I discovered photographs of Hélène Vanel in the ↗︎ Smith-Lesouëf Library, Nogent-sur-Marne on the outskirts of Paris. At that time (2010) the library was un-archived and beautifully chaotic. The discovery of the photographs led to a friend of Vanel’s, Raymond Labout retrieving her unpublished and untitled memoir (1985) which was located in the archives of the retirement home for elderly artists:

• This is not a list of facts, it is without a doubt a very partial biography, here nothing is chronological. (Excerpt translated from the first line, first page of the original manuscript by Hélène Vanel)

In brief to connect Vanel to the performance and film Thunderclap with the green parasols that you mention, in her memoir Vanel refers to a dance:

• My own Panthère Verte [‘Green Panther’] (of which I had written the music) died, as it should, on this Parisian stage, in front of a select audience. (Vanel, chapter 3, page 31)

As there wasn’t a description of the actual dance, I felt it was open to interpretation — a resurrection in fact — and so it became Thunderclap, a performance and film. Thinking about Vanel’s Panthère Verte also led to the stained glass mask Mask Panther (2012) which came together from offcuts of glass. I was searching for ellipses, leaf or almond shapes in the studio and realised the offcuts I had, formed a green feline mask. I was excited, it felt right and the mask became a kind of lens/protagonist in the film Pageant Roll (2012).

K*: I must add that the mask as a concept interests me because it is a peculiar construction that one hand is a layer, a disguise, hiding a truth beneath. But through wearing a ‘mask’ a new story just as true can be revealed. Like drag … And in this particular case, it is even one more layer: Those red masks in Thunderclap are also inspired by Hélène Vanel, correct?

J: The green glass Mask Panther is directly influenced by Vanel. The red ones, they’re paintings that are part of an ongoing series of woven stretched works. Held up to the face as masks they become a pair of eyes, dragon eyes in this case; the dragon (when the parasols are joined together making a body) could be Vanel’s Panthère Verte. The mask/eyes are as much about the act of looking at, as looking inwards or out. For a performance at the Smith-Lesouëf Library named Plat Verso (2011) I made a mask like one of Vanel’s, wore a costume and got into character so to speak. I vividly remember moving the mask a short distance away from my face and seeing the sky through the cut out eyes. I also saw the audience, somehow this was weird, I wasn’t expecting it, as before that, I felt like they couldn’t see me as I was wearing a mask. Of course they could see me. Still I tried not to lose my focus, then at this moment of removing the mask I was so struck by this feeling of seeing the world framed through the eyes of Vanel, so directly, through wearing their mask.

J: During my time at the Smith-Lesouëf Library I didn’t feel I had found what I was looking for. Then when I came across these photos of Vanel, which really made me jump, I knew I could stop looking. I’d been there several times before I came across the photographs, looking at them it was possible to identify one of them as being taken from the ‘Exposition Internationale du Surréalisme’, Paris, 1938. It was clear to see Marcel Duchamps’ 1200 Bags of Coal Bags hanging from the ceiling and the brazier below, and then Hélène Vanel in a nightgown standing behind it performing Salvador Dali’s L’Acte manqué (1938). The L’Acte manqué was a hysteric dance performed on the opening night. Vanel was enchained, convulsive, contorted — erotic … a surrealist construct, symbolic of the power of the subconscious to subvert and overthrow rationale and repression. The haunting scene, the total installation in all its theatricality, twisted the surrounding darkness as Europe approached WWII. To return to the photographs I could identify Vanel as her name was hand painted on a sign: ‘Théâtre Hélène Vanel’, Vanel is also standing in the picture with her collaborator and partner Lois Hutton.

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K*: Vanel, who seems to have been a Paris boheme still has not got a proper place in art history, as so many womxn of that time. Laura Smith wrote about this in the catalogue for your exhibition ‘Hill of Dreams’ at Tate St Ives in 2016. I think this text is very beautiful, and to share one of those paragraphs:

• Warboys also regularly works with little-known, or misunderstood, historical figures — often women — who she repositions within contemporary historical and geographic contexts. These include, but are not limited to: Boudica, first-century queen of the British Iceni tribe who led an uprising against the occupying forces of the Roman Empire (portrayed in Warboys’ film Boudica); Hélène Vanel, a French surrealist dancer, painter and sculptor of masks (explored in the 2011 film and exhibition À l’étage and the later films Pageant Roll and Thunderclap 2012); Beatrice Harrison, a British cellist who performed for the first live outdoor BBC broadcast in 1924 (depicted in Beatrice 2009); Joan of Arc, particularly via Jean Anouilh’s 1952 play The Lark about the French heroine (alluded to in Warboys’ 2010 exhibition and performance The Lark); and the turn-of-the-twentieth-century Welsh author and mystic Arthur Machen, who is recalled in Warboys’ most recent film Hill of Dreams. (Smith, page 48)

Neither of these are among your most recent work, but still I believe will have an impact on what you do today. Besides, I think it is extremely important how you sort of unmask history. SOMEONE needs to do that, expose this material to the rest, create visibility.

J: When there are holes so to speak in the archive/history there is a possibility to activate, not necessarily to rewrite what’s missing, but to enter a kind of portal to another life and time through that person/character or object/artwork and bring something back, into the present that stimulates some new way of looking or thinking. In the case of activating the character of Vanel it’s definitely as a celebration of a life not wanting to be forgotten. At one point in her memoir Vanel writes:

• I am very embarrassed to continue what I have been calling my “memoires”. For every life has changes, breakups and sometimes abandonment, and so we find our-selves on a rocky, thorny path where we are in pain and we don’t like our-selves. (Vanel, chapter 8, ‘PARIS’, page 71)

I included this in the ↗︎ Vanelephant as Vanel wrote her memoir at the end of her long life and this line gave a strong sense of her emotional self. The outcome with Thunderclap and the Vanelephant was the opposite of using the manuscript verbatim or approaching the material in a historiographical way, but to animate the idea of, or as you say ‘unmask’ Vanel in a written and performative way — a way that could generate something new with a root in the past.

K*: And regarding below, just curious; what is this? I got my eyes on it while looking at that video …

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J: The painting is by one of the Smith-Lesouëf sisters and was in the Smith-Lesouëf library. This library on the outskirts of Paris, was founded by two sisters, Madeleine Smith-Champion (1864–1940) and Jeanne Smith (1857–1943), in the early 1920s. Today, it is integrated into the Maison nationale des artistes, a retirement home for artists and writers. It was initially a private location and is now a space where artists and musicians can remain active during their final years. It’s where I discovered the photographs of Vanel.

K*: Shooting in: These characters are not easy to track in regular encyclopedias and archives either, just sayin’ …
You have many odd ‘protagonists’. Or props. Hoola hoops, for example, the eye/leaf, a wormhole vase more recently, or another weirdo that has been showing up for ten years or so, this curved line that looks a bit like a hook. It also appears in the book Vanelephant, as an ‘arm’ sticking out of a curtain. (see hat/tail) Same goes for Masks (2012), these red frame-like squares with purple paint, just large enough to cover a face. They are used as actual props in the Thunderclap — that we have just touched upon — but also exhibited as ‘objects’, so they switch from actual face coverings to pictorial/sculptural objects on the wall. In the film, however, the narrative follows two short haired womxn doing a sort of dance or hierarchical game in a park the Karlsauepark, Kassel during dOCUMENTA (13). The reason I mention all this is because I think this film illustrates how powerful displacement can be; and how the same object is being interpreted differently because they appear in an unexpected form or context. So, perhaps they need this back-and-forth that you are talking about …

J: Shifting statuses, back and forth, transitions keep things alive and vivid, part of a flow of forms that I hope generates new meaning through activation. I think the forms or props also begin to crystallize into more concrete sculptural forms at certain points and so part of another network of meaning. You can see this with the curved hook like tail in fur you mention as very much a prop in Pageant Roll (2012) becoming tails in glass, becoming printed tails in film and most recently prints on T-shirts. Vanel also spoke a lot about actual cats in her memoir and a feline presence has since become a recurring motif. The black cat’s tail in Pageant Roll is the remnant of a fur hat, it’s brim too wide and so snipped off to make it smaller. I thought this was such an enigmatic object, a furry tail alone, strewn in the middle of the floor; a fur snake? A fur hat that had made a tail from itself. I didn’t understand at first as I didn’t see the rest of the hat immediately, just the tail, now this transformation makes me think of [Paul B.] Preciado’s ↗︎ Countersexual Manifesto [2018/2011, written in 2000] and wonder if the hat snip tail could be a furry dildo, through subverting the imagined gender of an object.

• ↗︎ The dildo deconstructs any form of sexual authority. Inverting binaries to turn the subordinated terms (vagina, anus) into the privileged term (penis) leaves the hierarchal, authoritarian structure of meaning intact, but the dildo (the alien, the object the unsexual) defers authority indefinitely. (Preciado, page 67)

I like the idea of the ouroboros (cosmic snake or dragon eating its own tail) being replaced with the hat that made a tail from its brim, which can eat its own tail. The hat is the rest, the space, the void.

K*: Cats, tails, curves. What about another work, Hinge Bow (2013), commissioned for the 9th Bienal do Mercosul, 2013, ‘Weather Permitting’?

J: For the film Hinge Bow (commissioned for the 9th Bienal do Mercosul, 2013: ‘Weather Permitting’) I was thinking about hinges and bows, as in violin bows and bows and arrows as a concept/motif for a film, a way into Brazil, through something I could relate to on a personal level. I learnt the violin as a child. I wasn’t particularly good, but I liked the object; the bow, the wood, horsehair, the tension. I discovered the almost extinct Pau Brasil tree or Brazilwood, due to over exploitation, was only allowed to be exported to produce violin bows. Although it’s not in the film, more as an omnipresence, the bow gets translated into the sound of the Brazilian friction drum, the cuíca I had a kind of faith in the search for this tree in this unknown city, visiting parks and weaving this search into a narrative of forms and figures.

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The close up of the limbs creates a window or frame. I wanted to show the body sculpturally, then the body wavers slightly, and there’s a fragility in the dried leaf being turned. The figure is presented as something between a sculpture, a performer and a still life, in sections it is abstracted from its total being and we focus on the form and surface, when there’s a tremble it’s a reminder of the consciousness of the performer.

K*: These tigh(t)s …

J: The cat suit was something I saw in the window of Ropahrara Moda Exótica, not far from where we were staying in São Paulo. I was completely seduced by the glitter and ornament in the pattern, a double edged inescapable glitter skin like coffee and gold — reflecting these economies. When I make films, I often bring something from the studio, make something onsite, on location or weave in things I find during the shoot in or around the location — props that can perhaps propel events. Like the glittery suit.

NO FIXED ORIENTATIONS

K*: ↗︎ Our relationship started off with a pink snake painting and a panther mask at the old car wash gone gallery, She Will in the suburbia of Ski, Norway. Or, more precise: an email thread entitled ‘Date for chat’, now counting 49 emails. The idea was making a rather short feature, an introduction to your work, but then I found things I did not expect, such as that I really value how you sort of twist and disrupt and turn things upside down — literally speaking.

J: It’s great when someone is able to see a kind of constellation between the gestures you make … to see the evolution of forms in a way that resonates as opposed to things being experienced in isolation. The Pink Snake and the Panther Mask were a way in, I think they possess a kind of latent energy, then in the films and performances there’s the possibility of animating things in real time or imagined time so they can express some potential that’s maybe not so immediate.

K*: You told me earlier that you often work in series, and that the snake paintings are sort of the bridge between the sea paintings — which you have been working on for more than a decade — and the river paintings. Just to make it clear for the reader: These attributions — such as the snake and the river — describe the lines in those series, and include wax and pigments on raw canvas. The biggest difference from the sea paintings is that at some point during 2019 you started introducing beeswax, and that the motives got slightly more ‘directed’ or articulated, like ‘signs’, yet abstract. At She Will there was only one painting, a teaser. What is up with the lonely pink snake and the ‘2020’ mirroring in your last show at Gaudel de Stampa, Paris?

J: The snake paintings began with the thought of a vat of liquid beeswax and the gesture of pouring it like a bucket of paint. I was staying at a beekeeper’s at that moment in Zennor, Cornwall. To think about beeswax on a material level it’s sculptural, painterly, hard and liquid — it’s poetic and political.

K*: — And it smells!

J: And it smells. Smells really great!

So, I began wax painting, and made 3 snakes, then I began to incorporate the wax into paintings made at a river near my studio River Paintings. With the Snake Paintings I was thinking how their curves read like characters, not only snakes but letters and numbers. Then with the year being ‘2020’ it seemed natural to record this through recording the year it was being made in the form of the work itself, time as a painted object. As I played around with the forms I realised through mirroring the lines the 2s could also be read as Ss.

↗︎ http://0o0o0o0.org/2020202/index-2.html

K*: Hacking language …

J: — I guess I am fascinated with the possibility of things not really having a ‘fixed orientation’. When things are upside down, it’s like being on another planet, seeing the sun rise the other way up … it’s an escape from the familiar, banal order of things, seeing things float, looking more how you want them to feel, for me, film is perfect for this. In that sense mirroring the snakes and shifting the reading from 2 to S became a signal of how the ‘snakes’ or autochthones were feeling, something to be read. ‘SOS’ incidentally ‘HA TOUCHSTONE’ is an anagram of ‘AUTOCHTHONES’. I would turn that word over and over with the feeling something was hiding.

K*: Interesting that you describe the snakes as something to be read, even though it is rather abstract. Because till quite recently the pink snake at She Will was all lonely.

J: There are possibilities, having them in one line so they create a kind of syntax, or to be cycled through as in a GIF and read one after the other, I think the ‘reading’ is there in both modes, perhaps the animation also has something more animalistic, like a snake moving fast — it was funny what you said about that one ‘lonely’ pink snake, though, because I really think it was complete on its own — its own world and ideology kind of … snakefem.

THE ODD, ARTIFACTS AND MISFITS

K*: OK, let us rewind for a moment. I think it is a good idea starting somewhere that could be seen as a portal — literally speaking — to your work. We all need an entrance. ↗︎ A few years ago you also exhibited in Oslo at 1857, a former artist driven art gallery at Grønland, Oslo [‘Superior Props’, 06.11.–13.12.2015, with Mia Marfurt]. I may be biased as this was my ‘neighbourhood’, so to speak, and I also know the curators. Still, in my opinion, this is one of the most spectacular art spaces I have ever seen, a former lumberyard that unfortunately had to shut down as a consequence of gentrification and such but definitely made a mark. Your enormous canvases of the abstract pigment prints, or paintings such as the Sea Paintings, Dunwich (2015), an ongoing project that you started in 2009 with monumental raw canvases dyed with mineral pigments and salt water. Even they seem smaller under the heights … I think it is 11 meters. That was a wonderful piece!

J: I really enjoyed making that show! To give some context to the Sea Painting process, after art school working mainly with sculpture and film. I had a period without a studio which fed this strong urge to create works on a scale that was physical, this is what led to the Sea Painting. In the beginning I am not sure I even considered it as painting. It was more like a gesture that appeared like a painting. Then installed as something between a painting and a fabric within an architecture. I would rather compare it with going on one of my film shoots, you are basically there, with the props, then you bring the work back and begin the process of editing or not. The installation can also be the editing, in terms of finding the orientation or cutting/tearing into the painting, the first work I installed had a door cut into it and you could pass through it.

K*: I think what you say about ‘relocating’ events, rather than isolated happenings it becomes part of a more complex narrative.

J: For sure, in Sea Painting, Atlantic (2021) (made this summer at the edge of the North Sea in the Atlantic Ocean for ↗︎ the biennial ‘The Ghost Ship and the Sea Change’, GIBCA, Gothenburg) the atmosphere of this painting is both intense and light, it was incredibly heavy to make but then it is also partly defined by the context it would be shown in. It is installed amongst a huge metaphorical boat in Röoda Sten Konsthall, Gothenburg replicating the Danish West Indian trade vessel and slave ship Havmanden.

K*: Would you say the materials and methods themselves work as entrances for you, to learn more about the past, history?

J: Yes in a way combined with the context the work is in, when I was preparing for the Sea Painting, Atlantic (2021) I read ↗︎ WAKE: The Hidden History of Women-Led Slave Revolts and came away with a strong reminder of this huge truth, that so much of history needs to be imagined as it has been brutally erased, manipulated or even never recorded, in the case of WAKE, for exactly this reason Rebecca Hall has used part graphic novel, part memoir, research and imagination to do what’s otherwise virtually impossible — to show the lives, bravery and deaths of enslaved women forced to endure the Trans-Atlantic crossing.

K*: You sort of touched upon in the start with Vanel and the dance piece Le Panther Vert; how your dwelling with that material, almost as a ghost writer — mounted the ‘mask’ of Vanel onto yourself — and made Thunderclap — a ‘phantom’ cross time and space …

J: Maybe a kind of avatar, but I’m not sure, I guess as ghost writers are anonymous … It’s as simple as feeling a drive to explore and channel things … people, histories, stories. Perhaps it’s a way of making sense of things. In the end, I’m trying to project a way of seeing the world past and present in a material way. On a physical level I work with paint, film, sculpture running parallel. I like the idea of returning to a process after leaving it for a while. There can be multiple ways of doing what you want to do, and then of course much of it gets shaped by your circumstances. For me working with film has as much in common with the way I think about the Sea Paintings as prints, mediums move from a concept to a material. That said: I had not necessarily imagined that Sea Painting would be something I would return to, again and again, but in fact over time it became a process that I am really attached to a record that I want to keep. You can read them as a kind of map. Or, as a sequence of film, movements or frames — with their locations and times and specific atmospheres caught bringing them together over time is for me … really interesting. Each painting is particular to a time, it is a record and that record I can place in a sequence, or a space.

K*: The space is important. To return to 1857: I think that exhibition is a good example of how you relocate events by installing them in a new context, separate from the original event. First: When you went from the street through the office space with the 70’s flower power coverings, and then the exhibition hall, at 1857, you became so aware of your own size — your body — because the proportions totally changed. And even the canvases and objects were so large, so, in a sense the spectator became part of the whole set up, the scenography, so to speak. Like a tiny human, a gnome or a dwarf. This space opened up like a freaking ‘other’ world … 100 > square meters with raw concrete and windows to heaven … — I also find that particularly interesting since you apparently are very much concerned about how the body — your own and the spectator’s — relates to the work. Not only size and proportions, but also the performative aspect of being there with these large canvases, confronting or meeting the objects, physically relating to them. Anyway: Your work suited those proportions. And it goes back to the beginning: the body, and the canvas.

J: When you are on a beach even 7 meters of canvas does not seem huge, that feels really great, unrestrained. And then it is the heaviness and the weight from those wet canvases that is challenging. Soggy. Receptive. Raw and open, but, yes; I am working on a scale that is quite relative to my size — well, bigger. It goes back to thinking about proportions in a related manner as in a theater, on a stage, where the idea of performance is embedded in the surfaces, the fabrics, the space.

K*: In this sense the elements spoke particularly well with the architecture at 1857 as well. Second: The exhibition included several gigantic objects, so something happened in this dialogue — the conversation in between; with the walls, the floor, the ceiling; the person entering that room. It sort of gets back to start; the body and the canvas, same, but different.

J: I had three large paintings and three ‘lamps’ as well — props. One lying on the floor; two hanging from the ceiling. Together these elements functioned as a group

K*: But, these lamps —

J: I think I called them ‘torches’ [yes, Torches] — they were born out of a small prop that I used in a film, but that got much larger. In Hinge Bow, in fact.

K*: Spotlights on steroids …

J: Hard metal edges. One of the artists there, Steffen [Håndlykken], had asked me to think about the time of the year. It is very dark in Norway in November, as you for sure already know well. I had been messing around with domestic forms of lighting, and to then be able to take that to a much bigger space, to get metal bent, working with the space and not against it, was really great … — no, superior! [Laughing] Hence the title of the show, ‘Superior Props’. Also working with artist/composer Morten Norbye Halvorsen with sound (we have a long and ongoing collaboration, in particular relating to the sound of films and performances) to animate the lights it became a much more theatrical space and all the elements began to talk together, it was exciting.

K*: That does not happen too often. It is a bit like magic, right?

J: Exactly. Things are weird and wonderful. Sometimes I think there are a lot of hard edges in my work, and even if there is something fluid, moving through; it is probably a question of time … I mean things get closer, they drift apart … I guess essentially it is coming from a place that is sort of fractured. And then it sort of comes together again. Not again, but … know what I mean? — That is a process in itself. Sort of pursuing the pursuit of something.

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K*: Yes, and those props are actually one of my main ‘keys’ into your work. Because they ‘travel’. Like you say, in one moment they are part of a video, next a sculpture in a gallery. Back and forth, but always returning to films … Such as the floating thing in Hinge Bow. Let’s go a bit deeper, as I believe this is sort of a ‘key’: This film consisting of several sequences and shorter clips — in and out of focus, some just ‘observing’ the wind moving the palm leaf, and many other things such as a model/miniature metallic paper construction on a watery surface. And then this womxn, I assume, is wearing a glittery tight suit which we have already introduced. In this particular film the steel construction is penetrating a yellow board of some sort. Then this figure appears again, for example as a sculpture, typically lying on the floor in a gallery space. Then it appears again as we meet a full-metal lamp-version at 1857, lying there like the previous one, but all metal, lighting up the room. — In the film, however, this shape appears as a toy, or perhaps a Bauhaus or Constructivist ‘modernist sculpture’; elements joined in a playful or just ‘experimental’ way. This could have been dull. But the narratives that are being drawn up between these repetitions sort of activates it as a non-living protagonist object … or, is it just me?

J: In Hinge Bow I was also thinking about apertures, and focus/focusing, within this frame of looking for a Pau Brasil tree, so there’s a kind of storytelling. My direct experience of São Paulo, finding a catsuit that looked like coffee and gold, making a friend who played the squeaky Cuíca (the already mentioned tension drum) and finally finding a very hard to find, Pau Brasil in Burle Marx Park. In my mind this was all wrapped up in a wormhole, which removes the narrative from space and time in a linear sense. (From left: JW, VASE (2021). Jessica Warboys, still from Hinge Bow (2013). The wormhole graphics is a random screenshot from the WWW.)

CHAPTER 2: WOW! THE RUG AND CUT OUTS. THE BECOMING OF THE EARTH PANTHER.

K*: NICE!!

J: Thanks, it’s in progress …

K*: Never talk down a newborn! It is so raw. I really hope you are going to keep it like that. Raw and unpolished. Not yet ‘fully formed’. That’s alive. Those are absolutely amazing … I think. What are those shapes?

J: During Covid certain things emerged, one thing I had been thinking about but never really articulated in my work, was this dhurrie [showing a rug with a zigzag pattern]. Bibiji, my grandma wove it. I have carried it around, but had it tucked away for some time, until it’s pattern started to emerge in my drawings. When I realised what I was referencing I translated it into a printed motif. There are some forms in my recent prints that I would not say are personal, but come from some sort of personal reflection on storytelling through weaving. Bibiji wove a small group of dhurries [handwoven rug, an Indian term] and sadly this weaving ended abruptly on her arrival in the UK in the 1950s. I have the motif stored in the dhurrie I have and so this is my opening for storytelling, what was not in a sense, what is and what can be … or something completely abstract. It’s interesting to me to see how motifs, colours and shapes can appear in cycles. For me these are generative things that can be hidden and then suddenly reveal themselves.

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K*: And now they are becoming screen prints?

J: I often think about print or printmaking as something I do through my films and paintings, the way methods or processes are echoed or translated — there is this instantaneity with a film, and similarly with silkscreen I can work in an immediate way with a stencil. I think it also has to do with having something mediating a process and the screen [in screen printing] could be seen as a kind of resist. Even just to print an open screen — without any image — the mesh is a mediation I use to move a process/image making forward.

K*: A resistance from the material.

J: Yes, I like it when there is an immediacy but also something between me and the object, something not completely knowable, and it creates this revelation, a moment. When there are some variables, especially when it is more lo-fi with the silk-screen stenciling, I appreciate the inconsistencies — the analogue glitches which make each shape unique even though it’s possibly repeated. These prints are material for a film. This is something that feels like new terrain, but still, to me this is about things coming back, just in another form, the prints are part of a composition; as rhythm. I can show you a tiny bit …

A FEW MONTHS WENT BY …

K*: What's going on here?!

J: In VILLAGE GATE (2021) I was thinking about a floating doorway on a river you can pass through more than once. The river is flowing and circumstances are changing, but VILLAGE GATE is about re-entering a kind of floating moment. The VILLAGE GATE belongs to the EARTH PANTHER, and it’s world of woven textiles and printed woodblock patterns. I like the idea that it’s possible to return to, or escape a space through a conceptual doorway, like entering into a poem or the weave of a rug — a rug, that’s a poem.

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Thinking about doorways, Preciado talks about creating ‘doorways’ in language and a ‘new fabric’ …

• ↗︎ It is also a question of crossing the borders between philosophical genres; epistemological borders, between documentary, scientific, and fictional languages; the borders of gender, the borders between languages and nationalities, those that separate humanity from animality, the living from the dead, the borders between today and history. (Preciado, An Apartment on Uranus, 2020 [2019])

K*: Funny that you mentioned that. I just spoke to someone recently. I am so interested and invested in how language and how you use words to describe, to define borders … Hierarchies and segregating mechanisms are hidden in words … but of that same reason it can also be used for breaking down those ‘givens’ that are drawn up in our minds. That is actually sort of a ‘mission’ to me, slowly twisting this. Challenge binary thinking. I sort of like grey zones, hybrids, those things that cannot so easily be defined, because our vocabulary is outdated.

J: I agree, things don’t need to be so fixed, they can be reiminaged. As Preciado says you can draw a door with words.

• ↗︎ [T]his manifesto is a theoretical and poetic attempt to do what is done in cartoons: draw a door in the wall of sexual and gender oppression and escape through it. (Preciado, ‘POETRY IS THE ONLY POLITICS’, Countersexual Manifesto, page 17)

K*: You know, I love Preciado …
↗︎ In an article from March the i-D Vice called Preciado a ‘punk trans philosopher’. A strange characteristic if you ask me, in particular considering what the article is about: ‘post-gender’ gender-fluid, and ‘the other side of binary’ and Preciado’s recent anthology An Apartment on Uranus, the same as you're referring to above. Anyway. He further explains the needs for a new vocabulary, terminology and grammar. I totally agree … Language causes a lot of problems.

J: It’s difficult when things are already ‘written’ and so predetermined it creates a kind of trap. A non-constructive construction. I write small texts/poems in columns or scattered so they can be read in several directions and meaning is flexible, it can be projected but also shift with the reading, borderless in a way. Thinking about the internalisation of thought, I guess there’s a space between/within non-binary thinking, which perhaps could be considered similar to the littoral — between land and sea where things are possible and open … what you ‘cross’ from the land to the sea. Philip Ekardt wrote about this, and this geological term has stayed in my mind since:

• ↗︎ [Warboys'] Sea Paintings derive from the physical and natural dynamics that define and shape the liminality of land and ocean. These are works that, geo-aesthetically speaking, are forged from littoral zones. What used to be a transposition of the littoral into visual subject matter has now become material to the work itself. […] As indexes these works point, one might say, to the site where water and land meet. But beyond this, it is the quality of the littoral itself — a liminal situation, a placement in a littoral and conceptual borderland — which forms an important, even structural, aspect of much of her work, as it strategically seques between so-called ‘autonomous’ and ‘decorative’ artwork […]. Hers, then, is a different sort of liminality, one that is less concerned with phenomena of inclusion and exclusion — does the sea include or exclude the land? Does the land include or exclude the sea? — and more with passing from one to the other. (Ekhardt, Hill of Dreams: Jessica Warboys, page 64–65, 2016)

K*: When you showed me that rug … and those stencils; it was something with that simple gesture of rotating those shapes in such a direct manner … as simple as splitting and putting it together again differently so it is no longer easy to say ‘what’ or ‘whom’, functional or dysfunctional. Rethink and reinterpret. And that twist that could be done quite literally: for a word, a shape, or concept; when you add the historical and sociological connotation — because those shapes are never neutral, neither are words. — I think this play with forms gave me a totally different entrance to your work. Suddenly those recognizable forms were there, but as opposed to simply ornamental, they appeared as acts. The deconstruct > reemerge. And that everything is actually in flux, always, only kept stable by different hierarchies. Sometimes these structures are violent or evil, too, as pointed out regarding your work (Smith quoting German art historian and theorist Aby Warburg in the 2016 essay ‘Musical Statues in Hill of Dreams, Tate St Ives, England; Casa Masaccio, Italy; and Stavanger Kunsthall, Norway, page 52): ‘Like Warboys, Warburg did not consider an image as contextually bound. Rather, he assigned a new meaning to each image in each new constellation: ‘history is to be told like a fable: ghost stories for all adults.’

J: I agree things are rarely as neutral, or as seemingly naive as they may appear. Intentions are not always clear. In this case I was also thinking about rugs as paintings, how you don’t really need to give them a top and a bottom as you approach them from different angles. You can roll them up, view them horizontally and vertically and when they come undone there could be another story hiding inside, in the weave. A ghost, parallel to how I consider the Sea Paintings in a way. I’m interested in abstract portraits, some kind of essential transfer of being or having been something more restless and unfixed. Mirroring, doubling, these drive me and I’m not sure why, if I knew completely there’d be no point. Although, it’s interesting when you’re confronted with some kind of insight into your own work, like a work made some time ago … Perhaps you’re not always hiding, when you’re wearing a mask.

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Quotes from Hélène Vanel’s original manuscript are translated by Warboys and © Fondation nationale des arts graphiques et plastiques, Paris, 1985. All rights reserved.

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Four unpolished conversations on context sensibilities, frames and routines, and avoid being squeezed. Plasticity as a way of resistance. Listen and reflect with us. Medio September we will drop them, one after another, during the exhibition periode of ‘↗︎ SQUEEZE’ at one of our true favourite art spots: She Will. Second out is Jessica — three chapters behind the scenes, on shapes of joy and objects of gesture — and due to the virus we had to meet TST (trough screen tech). The whole event was rounded off with a ‘thought & pleasure’ session in the exhibition itself — at the petrol station in the central suburbia of Ski, inside the abandoned car wash — with Liv and Maren, the eminent founders. And a couple of bottles natural wine. More on ‘↗︎ SQUEEZE’ and ↗︎ She Will here.

A meeting that started as a blind date, a virtual conversation (due to COVID-19), more material along the way, > 50 electronic mails, a chat with wine and a rather poor beer a week later, to become T-shirts. The at first less visible trails were revealing one surprise after another. A bit like the entrance to the gallery in the old lumberyard. Or, that wardrobe in ↗︎ Narnia; entering and luckily not stumbling upon that terrible witch that killed the lion Aslan — one of the worst tales I know of. Instead we did meet a few other personas, such as ↗︎ Hélène Vanel and ↗︎ Paul Preciado. July 2021 we finally managed to meet Jessica in person as well. How nice. The shirts have been available since October 2021, but launched for real at Kiosken, March 2022. Find them ↗︎ here.