Philippa Jones has created a secular chapel of suspended orbs and it's as magical as it sounds
'What I wanted people to feel when they left was uplifted'
I've seen people yelping, dancing, swinging their arms or panting into hidden microphones at previous Philippa Jones exhibitions. Her artwork fuses animation, projection and gaming systems with paintings and drawings to playfully spur the viewer into movement, putting them right into the art piece. Jones says, "People are also much more accepting of a shift in reality and more likely to participate if it's a game than an art piece. In a gallery space we are often hesitant to play. Art is serious, whereas games are fun."
When I pushed open the gallery door for Jones's most recent show Suspended, I wasn't expecting the quiet. Was the hush prompted by the warning on the gallery door about the graphic images of animal necroscopies?
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On opening night, the gallery at The Rooms was filled with viewers. Some were taking in Jones's large-scale drawings of the aforementioned gutted animals and others were laying on their backs, staring up into into Jones's suspended "chapel" of orbs. On why she created this immersive space, Jones explains: "I've been thinking about how in a more secular age we don't have spaces that the churches once offered where we get to contemplate the bigger questions about life and death. So the the orbs almost create a secular space of wonder."
The orbs are indeed a wonder. There are over 2500 palm-sized bubbles of clear epoxy containing seeds, bones, feathers, petals, insects, leaves, seaweed and other natural ephemera. They're strung on invisible thread from high above, creating a shimmering circle of droplets or tears. I visited the gallery several times to take them in, and Jones says at least one person does the same every day. Why are the orbs are so fascinating? She says: "The act of preservation makes something eternal, like the bugs you find in amber that's being preserved for hundreds of thousands of years. But at the same time they're actually always dead. They're not able to decompose and become part of a life cycle again that was gonna be preserved in this in-between state. I wanted to convey that sense of timelessness but also perhaps a sense of potential."
The natural world has always figured prominently in Jones's work, but it's usually a jumped-up nature that embraces the supernatural with resurrected birds, crystals erupting from rivers and the cliffs, and giant swarming insects. The work in Suspended is more in touch with the grisly reality of nature. Jones remembers, "I watched David Attenborough like every British kid. It's a total stereotype, but I loved natural history programs and I grew up on the edge of a town in the countryside and would spend all my time wandering around in the fields by myself and collecting things from nature."
Part of her deepening connection to the natural world, she notes, comes from the meditative practice of drawing. A decade ago when she came to Newfoundland with an MA in Interactive Design, she didn't have access to the tools needed to carry on that work. The deficit forced her back to the basics. She now says that drawing has become crucial in developing her ideas and enabling her to make work that jumps from medium to medium. She muses, "I don't even think I had a computer when I first moved over and I had to leave my art supplies behind. So I used what I could to start: making drawings because it was cheap and didn't take up much space and I could do it from my small apartment when we first moved here. I have carried on working in interactive art, but it's still with a hand-drawn focus to it."
The drawn imagery in Suspended flirts with the macabre. There's a 20-foot tall pile of dead birds, plus gutted rabbits and goats and a series of large scale drawings of a flayed moose. But the images are not explicit; they are, instead, finely rendered ink drawings with watercolour washes. And the devotional symbolism of the orbs extends to the drawings; the moose necroscopy is on three large panels forming a triptych, not unlike what you'd see in a Renaissance church. There's a "holy" trinity of gutted rabbits and, in some of the drawings, there's a human hand in the entrails evoking the famous Caravaggio painting The Incredulity of Saint Thomas. Jones recently lost a dear friend, curator Mary MacDonald, and she says the drawings were inspired by her struggle to come to terms with Mary's death. She says, "You see death often in the animal world and in the cycles of life around you. I also used to work in a hospice when I was in art school — that was one of my jobs. In pop culture and even in art, people might die suddenly or be shot and they just kind of keel over. But we're not given that exposure to actually fading away or to the process of dying."
Suspended will be at the Confederation Centre of the Arts in Charlottetown, June 22-October 6.
Stream CBC Arts: Exhibitionists or catch it on CBC Television Friday nights at 11:30pm (12am NT) and Sundays at 3:30pm (4pm NT). Watch more videos here.
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