Guard by Jodie Carey

The Edel Assanti Gallery

The Edel Assanti gallery, which we visited on the Slade’s, The Art of Looking Course is currently exhibiting work by the artist Jodie Carey. It’s one, huge installation called Guard and it fills the entire gallery through two rooms and a linking corridor. It consists of 150 individual sculptures, grouped so that you must thread your way through them via a series of narrow, winding paths.

The gallery is in Fitzrovia and from the outside has that somewhat austere, New Yorkish vibe that can seem a bit daunting. The sort of place that instantly makes you feel like you’ve sprouted five arms, three left feet and have sweat leaking from every pore. Clumsiness is one of your core values and you immediately start worrying that you will turn into Mr. Bean and end up owing them £30,000 for breakages within fifteen seconds of setting foot across the threshold. To be honest, if our tutor Rose hadn’t taken us there, I’m not sure I would ever have gone in. That would have been a shame, because it was a great visit, and I learned a lot.

Commercial galleries are strange places. They need people to go into them because the job of a commercial gallery is to sell art, but there is, for me, always that gatekeeperish air about them. We want people, but not people like you, says the voice in my head when I peer into the window of places like this. That’s not a very helpful voice, but I learned it in branches of Benetton in the Eighties and it has proved infuriatingly hard to shake. Harder than learning to fold a Benetton jumper and escape in a tearing hurry before the icy disapproval of a shop assistant with ideas above their station freezes you in your tracks.

A combination of getting older and caring less and listening to podcasts like

Katy Hessel

The Great Women Artists and Talk Art means that I am getting braver. The gallery visits with Rose dealt the final death blow to that Benetton inspired gatekeeper, and now I will unfold jumpers and visit galleries with gay abandon.

Each individual piece that makes up the installation was as tall as me, grouped in clumps of four or five or strung out singly, edging the paths down which you walked. From outside it, you are confronted by a sea of what were once clearly organic, living things that now seem blankly sculptural and weirdly other. It’s hard to know how to begin to approach it, faced as you are with a clump of strange, cream objects, massing against the whiteness of the gallery walls. It felt, when I stepped in, like the thoughts in my head about who was allowed in here (not me) were being made concrete in front of my very eyes, which was quite unsettling. I wondered if the guarding quality of the piece alluded to people like me being kept out of places like this? It was intriguing and as a woman who cannot resist a metaphor, I overcame the urge to run away and sat with my feelings of unease instead.

The sculptures were created when Carey went back to her studio after lockdown and found the courtyard outside thronged with weeds and wildflowers. She harvested the plants, binding individual blooms and stalks with string and hessian, to create the tall, sentinel type structures which she then cast in earth. This process involves wetting soil and pressing what you want to cast into it. Once you’ve removed the original object, you fill the hollow with your chosen material and then, when it cures, you can remove it.  Carey used jesmonite, which is a little like Plaster of Paris. Finally, the pieces were mounted on metal stands and secured with visible, twining wires, escaping from their edges, mimicking the roots and branches that gave them life the first time. This second life hovers between the organic and the made, the living and the dead and allows for the weird, transformative journey that we, as participants in the art are about to undertake. On consideration, that not you, vibe starts to become a far more rewarding curiosity with the liminal space Carey creates. It becomes an invitation to explore and once you step forward, you are hooked.

Once you start off down a path, there is no definitive way to navigate through it. It’s up to you. The space between the pieces requires a single file approach and a great deal of care because it would be so easy to catch yourself on a wire tendril. Each structure is, on closer examination, quite fragile. The casting process catches notches of string, leaves and petals, even hairs on the surface of the plants. If you don’t approach this slowly, you run a real risk of knocking something off and that would never do. The very nature of the making and display forces you to take your time and really look at what surrounds you. It was so interesting to me that once you step inside it, the piece becomes more like a performance than a ‘thing’. Once you as the viewer start moving, thinking and looking, what was static becomes haptic. The art starts happening in time as well as space. It’s weirdly and satisfyingly alchemical.

The illusion of uniformity that initially greeted me started to shimmer and dissolve as I threaded my way through the structures. Plant material that seemed of a piece suddenly showed how it had been consciously and thoughtfully built up by Carey with sections connected with textiles, string and wire. Crumbles of the earth that the pieces had been cast in are caught in folds and pockets of jesmonite. Curls of rust from the wire freckle the cream of the finished object. Hollows between the curve of a leaf or the promise of a bud cast shadows. The more you look, the more you see and although each piece is uniquely different to every other piece, as a whole you begin to see a more fractal quality to the work that is intensely interesting. There are patterns and repetitions, differences and sameness that catch at your awareness. At times I was reminded of a musical score. A rhythm was being created through movement and observation, but this is a score that will change with every journey through the piece, depending on what paths you decide to take.

The care with which each of these intensely fragile pieces has been put together becomes apparent as you examine them up close. It’s not only that the finished pieces are fragile, it’s that they were constructed of delicate organic material and then cast in an equally organic and complex way. The sheer amount of time taken to make even one piece starts interacting with the slow time you as the viewer takes to work your way through the objects. As you look, you see plants caught in various stages of their life cycle, a time of blooming, a time of dying, a bud, a seed, a flower head. Time is caught in a moment but is also moving with you and through you. At that point things started to get really trippy.

That’s where I started to think about the nature of making something that is in effect an absence. The original structures of plant material and fibres are not actually there in the room. Casting them is a way to make something empty into something solid and real. It takes something impermanent and subject to decay and holds it in a moment that stretches on beyond its natural life. A fleeting moment is caught and not only held in the jesmonite structure, but similarly cast into the shadows on the gallery wall. Moments of absence and being start proliferating wildly and the piece takes on a life that grows into and beyond the gallery wall. I began to think of them as guardians of time and space rather than as things designed to keep me out of places I have no right to be. The whole experience became wildly porous.

I absolutely loved the importance Carey gives to these plants that sprang up, unattended, altering a human space into something wild and strange, which is exactly what she achieved within the walls of the gallery. I loved too, that it reminded me of Understorey: A Year Among Weeds by Anna Chapman Parker, which I wrote about here. The delicate, swift capture of something ephemeral in her drawings and the workings between the lines and the blank spaces on the page spoke the same language to me, as the structures I was viewing in the gallery. I am a woman who is afraid of blank spaces, on the page, in life and in my own artworks. I worry about what might creep into the unguarded spaces I have left behind. Both Carey and Chapman Parker’s work invite me to sit with those feelings and reassess them.

How do we talk about absence? How do we understand time in a meaningful, human way rather than a Stephen Hawking, quantum type way? How do we capture the ephemeral yet deeply meaningful ways that we feel alive in this world that are beyond the beating of our hearts or the pulse of our blood? So much of what it means to be a human being is fleeting and yet so richly complex that we often find ourselves struggling for words to describe what we feel so profoundly. Why is there only one word for love, when my life has taught me that there are dozens of ways to love a person and each one of them is uniquely different from the other? Why is the word anger so inadequate to describe that red, hot, slicing jolt that rises through us or the anger borne from fear, which is more like a sickening wave?

Words are good. They are my trade. I dabble in making visual art and I love it, but words are my tools and even they let me down sometimes. With all these words here, I have attempted, clumsily to pin down just a fraction of the thoughts purling through my head about these artworks, when actually all you need to do is step inside that room and you can feel all the things I’m talking about and more in a mere moment. That is the power of art. It connects us to our lived experience in an immediate, important way. That’s what I love and the more I see, the more I crave, because it does in an instant what it takes me hard hours, pounding at a keyboard to express.

I just finished reading Audre Lorde’s Sister Outsider. Talking about poetry she says:

‘…poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams towards survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action. Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought. The farthest horizons of our hopes and fears are cobbled by our poems, carved from the rock experiences of our daily lives.’

That’s what looking at art does for me. It gives name to the nameless and helps me find paths towards the language I need. That’s what this exhibition did for me.