Message in a bottle
This essay was written in response to Jessica Bell’s project Letters*, which was launched online in the summer of 2020. Documentation of Letters* can be found on Jessica Bell’s website, https://www.jessicabell.ca/
I remember in Ottawa during the 1st year of your MFA that you once said that 'painting is always making a liar of me' - this being because you would plan to make this, that, or the other thing, and then be drawn back to painting. I think because of this, and the first conversations that I had with you about both fibrecraft and painting, I'm unable to think of your work as separate from either craft or painting at any given moment. At least, this is true of how I think of Letters*. I also remember when I saw you last in Ottawa in June 2018 you had told me you were considering how to negotiate the presence of objects within institutions based on craft ethics, and in an email you sent to me in Dec. 2017 you described the feeling of the lack of exchange in your circumstances during this period:
"There are encounters with art that are structured around taking, and, more rarely, around an exchange...What if art could be an act of generosity, or maybe of receiving?"
Letters* seems shaped by this problem. More specifically, it seems structured around the offer and desire for handmade things.
Your write that "Letters* are for people." Your deliberateness in saying so connects this to craft for me, or at least disconnects Letters* from the implied cycle of studio production to exhibition to storage closet. In craft there is often a 'recipient' with a tailored set of needs, even if that recipient is the maker themselves, or a couch cushion. Knitted sweaters are tailored to the measurements of the recipient, and hand-made tables are made to suit a space and need. In most art forms, the recipient of the form is an audience, and most artists reverse the consideration of need to be able to do the work they do. The question that comes before making something is less, "what does my recipient need, and how will I make it?" Instead the question is: "what do I want to make, and where will I find an audience?" Letters* merges together the considerations of a recipient and an audience with the way that you have structured how a person receives a Letter - before the real-life picture can be sent to them, they have to state their want of it.
Again, you write, "Letters* move by mail. From one home to another. Inside to inside via outside." This method of viewing and transport bypasses some obvious present concerns for most audiences: ie, the problem of gathering. Whether by coincidence or need, Letters* plays to the distance and disassembly of an audience in COVID-19 by bypassing a gallery viewing. On this side of the Atlantic, the only art experiences that have returned or kept going are the ones that happen in solitude - a person can stream an existing movie or a show, or enter a gallery at a limited capacity with the anonymity and safety of a face mask. One wonders what the life of a picture is when it's not being looked at. A friend (who you know, David Kaarsemaker) made the joke last year of 'if a painting falls in the woods, does anyone hear it?' A possible answer to this secret life of things comes from R Murray Schafer in The Soundscape (1977):
"What is the sound of a tree falling in the woods with no one there to hear it?" asks a student who has studied philosophy. It would be unimaginative to reply that it sounds merely like a tree falling in the woods, or even that it makes no sound at all. As a matter of fact, when a tree crashes in a forest and knows that it is alone, it sounds like anything it wishes...from past or distant future. It is even free to produce those secret sounds which man will never hear because they belong to other worlds..." (Schafer 24)
The way that Letters* move from you to your remote audience hints at the problem of a picture that's not being looked at. If it's not on the wall, or in the studio, a Letter is probably in transport, as the stamps and packaging will retroactively attest. A picture outside a home or without a viewer might lose object permanence within cultural perception, but it doesn't de-materialize either.
In all my fuss about the means and the method of Letters* I don't mean to ignore the actual look of them. The compositions of these pieces seem to play with a core set of formal ideas that turn into calls and responses through cut and traced forms. In #16, an upward growing tumour of red appears to have been shaped by the cut form it is bleeding on to. #22 hosts a red shape form overlaid on two painted versions of its reversed image, as if to create an impossible shadow. Each picture is whole but several could be divisible into two main components, like the diagonal fragments of #3 or the front/back or inside/outside setup of #25. The piece I received today, #9, could look like an object dividing itself from an original body like a cell during mitosis. The colours of these pictures are pleasurable, and it's strange to think of them separated after becoming accustomed to the documentation of them all together, even though I know they are all going to people who will ask nicely. For now, I can only thank you for sending me one of them, and say that I will be responding with more soon.
Sources:
Schafer, R. Murray. The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World. Knopf, 1977.