Whether carved in stone or wood, printed onto a page, belted or beat out by a body, or humming in the mind, poems are meant to engrave and adhere. Ancient Greek poetry exhibits a particularly acute awareness of change, decay, and the ephemerality inherent in mortality. Yet it couples its presentation of this awareness with an offering of meaningful embodiment through shifting forms that are aligned with, yet subtly manipulative of, mortal time. Poetry, then, might be understood metaphorically as writing on the body, the artform of scarification, for it is in play with both the dynamics of organic change and the intent toward ongoing meaning.

— Sarah Nooter,

Greek Poetry in the Age of Ephemerality, 2023

A Reflection on —
New works by Jessye

Ekphrasis is a collaborative residency project exploring the time-honoured correlations between text and image. [i] It features the words of poet, writer, literary scholar, translator and editor Ouyang Yu and the images of multi-disciplinary visual artist Jessye Wdowin-McGregor.

From July until November 2023, Jessye worked with Ouyang to capture a short film exploring his ‘tree-writing project’ - a poetic representation of his daily practice of writing poems on the trunks and leaves of trees in Bundoora Park, Kingsbury, a site of inspiration the poet has returned to again and again for almost thirty years.

The film, a ‘video poem’ featuring Ouyang’s words and Jessye’s sounds and imagery, was conceived as a reflection upon ecology and time, the artists’ mutual love of nature, belief in the spontaneity of the creative act and the vitality of the poetic image in the search for a sense of spirit and place.

Jessye concurrently examined flora and fauna in the parklands and the surrounding Dirrabeen (Darebin) waterways, continuing her long-standing inquiry into her relationship with place, particularly plant life in the urban realm and her broader search into ‘the thresholds between body and landscape’.

For the final exhibit, Jessye presented An ode to tree-writing (树木写作颂), her video poem, alongside three historical works from her photographic collage series, The Surface Ripples, three new still-life photographs and, for the first time, two new bodies of sculptural work. 

The collages were first presented at Bargoonga Nganjin, North Fitzroy Library, earlier this year. Four works from the series were displayed during the first part of the residency as the subject of four ekphrastic poems [ii] by Ouyang being:

‘The Spiral Unfurled’ 2023
'Self-Portrait’ 2023
'Bullet in Bloom’ 2023
‘Bitter Grass, et al, as App Assessed’ 2023

In the final exhibit, they were presented in the book displayed on the front table.

Drawing on Jessye’s love of Greek mythology, particularly the story of Daphne and Apollo, these evocative digital prints, photographed from paper collages of found imagery overlaid with delicate plant matter, depict ‘gods, hybrids, and mythological beings’.  

As Jessye writes in her artist statement:

These source images resonate with an unfixed quality, in part due to the nature of images that precede digital reproduction – bearing both the grain of analogue photography and the trace of mass-produced imaging, such as misregistration and halftone printing. Further abstracted and re-contextualised through the process of collage, vegetal, mineral, and cosmological forms intersect, accumulate, and diffuse across the artefacts. Enigmatic interrelations, new visual sediments and seams, the overlaying of living flora, and the complex play of surfaces, result in images that stir with a sense of life force and material trace, despite being flattened multiple times by the camera. 

At the heart of this series is Jessye’s examination of ideas of metamorphosis and shifting forms, ‘entanglements with the natural world’ and the wider search for the inexpressible in art and life. She elaborates:

Collages are always in movement, suggesting new symmetries and meanings; this idea is further emphasised through the subject of the source content used in this series, which reference stories of change and transformation, as well as through something beyond surface value alone: the sense of an image turning, resisting interpretation, and just on the cusp of slipping away.

It was this body of work and her broader interests in the natural sciences, archaeology and ancient storytelling from Greece and elsewhere that inspired Jessye to delve more deeply into mythology and her long-standing interest in the idea of metamorphosis and shifting forms, this time through two sculpture projects and a new series of still-life photographs.

Her first project involved casting her hands in bronze and then creating a mirror image of them in beeswax and delicate leaf matter collected during her walks with Ouyang.

In the exhibition space, the bronze hands sit in the front window, surrounded by a selection of Ouyang’s leaf poems and shells collected by Jessye.

Fingers outstretched, the gesture is inspired by that critical moment in the myth of Daphne and Apollo, when Daphne, the beautiful river nymph, is turned into a laurel tree by her father (the river god Peneus) to escape the unwanted advances of the god Apollo – partly inspired by Jessye’s love of famous depictions of the scene by Gian Lorenzo Bernini, Rene-Antoine Houasse and others.

As the classicist comedian Natalie Haynes remarks:
As so often in Greek myth – and particularly when it is collected and retold for a Roman audience by Ovid – nature is shown to be a set of contradictions: Daphne is saved by a river god, transformed into a tree. And yet her bucolic salvation is also her destruction. The laurel tree is safe from Apollo’s unwanted sexual desire, but the river nymph is lost. [iii]

This idea that the natural world represents both salvation and destruction – depending on one’s interpretation – is a common theme in ancient Greek mythology. As an artist passionate about ecology and interested in examining the thresholds between body and landscape, it’s an endlessly fascinating idea for Jessye.  

She often pictures her body – particularly her hands – in her photographs, collages and video works. Akin to Ouyang’s tree-writing, it’s a performative gesture that she uses to place herself into the landscape. The outstretched hand, abstracted from the body, expresses a gentle rapprochement between self and nature. Through the association with the hand, one feels an inherent sense of movement and transformation in the work. 

For instance, her hand appears in her gentle video work, A Concrete Place, 2022. A continuation of her longstanding examination of urban waterways, which began with an examination of the river Thames in London in 2017 during a residency at ACME, A Concrete Place 2022 is a touching poetic exploration of the everyday experience of walking along the Moonee Moonee (Moonee Ponds Creek) between COVID-19 lockdowns. 

It was exhibited at correspondences as part of the project, Drawing Sound, along with Image with hand, plant and stones, 2023, her photographic collage, this time picturing her body as she explored the Birrarung (Yarra river) with collaborator, musician/composer Genevieve Fry.  

Looking at Jessye’s outstretched bronze hands, one is immediately struck by their magnificent details, delicate fingers, palm lines, fingernails, their beautiful human-ness. For those who know the artist, they’re unmistakably Jessye’s hands, and yet, they could also belong to anyone. 

Holding those hands is a simple pleasure and this awakens something else, something comforting, familiar and vaguely nostalgic. It’s the association with Jessye but it’s also their materiality, the weightiness of the bronze, its familiar smell perhaps even, for those of us who grew up with a small bronze relic in the home – a figure of a deity or something else.

Jessye’s hands also found their way into the video poem and of course, in the second pair of hands made from beeswax and delicate leaf matter.

In these responses – sculpture, still-life photograph and video – the materiality of the performative gestures is different. Yet, both speak to a relationship with a place that is both fleeting and ephemeral as much as it is ancient, enduring and interconnective.

It’s an intuition that owes much to the hand’s/hands’ gesture – that gentle rapprochement - and the choice of materiality, the dialogic between the delicate, ephemeral nature of beeswax/plant matter and the heavy, permanence of bronze.

But it's also the powerful way Jessye arranges her hands, in the gestures sculpted and in the compositions constructed and sequenced in her videos and still-life photographs that express a certain sense of magical realism - fantastical elements, grounded in the real world context, that invite us to notice how magical, fantastic and strange ordinary, everyday objects and things can appear in the real world when you stop and look at them closely.

For instance, on the opposing wall in the exhibition space, Jessye’s new still-life photograph, As above the earth, so below it; two hands sink softly and the grass brims with dew, 2023, pictures the bronze hands photographed in situ alongside the Dirabeen river in Bundoora Park, gently overlaid with plant matter, a tiny bird’s egg, and then re-photographed.

In the image, the hands shimmer with supernatural force, more silver than bronze – a happy accident of light when Jessye filmed early one morning, rather than a trick of the camera – and at first, this effect underscores their incongruence; what are these mystical objects, placed just so, here in this place?  

But, through that luminescent quality, the eye makes a connection with the top left-hand corner of the composition, tiny speckled lights reminiscent of a night sky of shimmering stars that are, in fact, reflections of light on the river’s edge.

Floating in the ‘sky’ is a delicate-looking dandelion seed, with bristles that radiate like the sun. The whole scene feels more celestial than earthly.

But as the viewer continues to look more closely at this work (also in tandem with the other new works in the series), one notices repeating earthly motifs from nature – the spirals and intricate patterns of lines of bristles and leaves, the smooth, intricately lined hands and that patinated egg (also reminiscent of the snail shells Jessye collects displayed elsewhere in the exhibition space).

One can’t help but think about the vegetal, animal and mineral – humans, birds, fossils, perhaps snails and the world on and below the earth. It’s an association that draws the viewer into looking more closely at the far right bottom corner of the composition.

Is that shimmering soil or ancient volcanic rock below the leaf and egg (shell), or does the mind want to make that magical leap or association in connection with the familiar shimmering quality of the bronze hands, the source of which ultimately also comes from the earth?

While there is a sense of interconnection between that earth and the hands, there is also a sense of ‘placedness’, of human arrangement – and with that comes a feeling of transience, of shifting forms, a sensibility shared with the hand that grasps the leaf in the video, that moves, ever-so-slightly in a gentle breeze.

In The plants are talking between the touching of planes, 2023 and The language of leaves hum and sigh in my ear as they drift to the floor of the ever-stirring earth 2023, that sense of shifting forms, animated by Jessye’s carefully crafted layering, is palpably present. As in her video work, this is where Jessye’s visual poetry is strongest.  

Her unique style of layering materials or elements of the landscape constantly shifts the viewer’s perspectival engagement, encouraging an appreciation of intimate details, patterns of interconnectedness and poetry - in leaf forms, the bark striations of the trees, the spiralled form of a spider’s web, a patinated egg, and so on. 

It’s a quality that underpins the sense of intimacy felt in the work – that also conveys the immense complexity of the natural surroundings and our relationship to/with them while maintaining a sense of spontaneity in the capture that is in keeping with the true spirit of nature that is essential and timeless but also profoundly innovative.

This deep appreciation for the intimate details of nature is enlarged upon further in the exhibition space through Jessye’s second sculpture project, a new series of bronze castings of elements from nature, especially shells.

In this new series, she has been exploring the idea of these small sculptures as tiny monuments or talismans. Five works are presented throughout the exhibition space. Like the bronze hands, rendering these tiny shells in bronze – these tiny animal homes - somehow reanimates them.

Through the association with this idea of the shell as home, one can’t help but think about the connection between humans and the more-than-human – that shared understanding of what it means to live and inhabit a certain place, be we human, mollusc or sea creature.

Shells are one of humankind's oldest and most familiar symbols – a truth acknowledged by philosopher Gaston Bachelard in his book Poetics of Space, in which he wrote of the belief since ancient times of the shell as a symbol of the body enclosing the soul. For Bachelard, shells also make one think about human withdrawal into isolation. 

Through the gesture of casting these exact replicas, a creative act that animates the process of thinking about this dialectic, these otherwise commonplace objects from nature are rendered fantastical. And yet they are also palpably real. 

Jessye's small sculptures ask us to think about this, to notice the intimate beauty of these tiny homes - the shared human and more-than-human desire for comfort, refuge and a sense of belonging. 

Notes:—

[i] * Ekphrasis, from the ancient Greek ἔκϕρασις meaning ‘description’, can be understood as a vivid, often dramatic, verbal description of a visual work of art, either real or imagined that comes from ancient Greco-Roman times when rhetorical description exercises were considered important for a person’s development of their written and perceptual skills.

In the contemporary literary field, it is understood to describe a poem created by a poet looking at a painting. However, in the visual arts and music, it is often a term that is more expansive, used to describe as the scholars Nigel Krauth and Christopher Bowman write: ‘intermedial creative processes where, for example, a painting is inspired by a piece of music, or the composition of a piece of music is inspired by a poem.’

[ii] Ekphrastic poetry has come to be defined as poems written about works of art; however, in ancient Greece, the term ekphrasis was applied to the skill of describing a thing with vivid detail. To learn more, check out this Getty resource.