Jessie Makinson: Mysterious Gardens, Reconstructed Narratives
YC: I noticed the title of the exhibition and some of the works do not have the same meaning in English and Chinese. What do you consider these naming and translations?
JM: The exhibition title Sting to Your Bow is a mix of two sayings, “sting in your tail” and “string to your bow.” If I was to say you've had another string to your bow, it would be like you had another talent or something. It’s mixed with “sting in your tail,” which means having a sharp tongue. I'm interested in wordplay, misunderstandings, and translations. And it's quite interesting that during the Enlightenment period in 18th-century Europe, lots of women were writing translations for their husbands' academic texts, so it was quite common for women, obviously wealthy women, to be educated, to be acting as translators in some cases. Because they would be super involved with their husbands' work. There was also an odd fashion for people to write weird little fantasy stories at the end of the scientific paper. I suppose that's one reason why I'm interested in this kind of mistranslations.
The painting My Head Was Filled with Dew comes from the drops on the figure. She's supposed to be covered in dew and wet grass. They were brought to this big garden that was saved by the National Trust in England called Great Dixter. The flower beds in this garden are really high. And they have these huge, precious plants that you can walk through them. I once went to the garden on a stormy day; all the flowers were waving above our heads. So that's kind of where I got the idea for this garden. The high flowers are prancing around and are much bigger than the figures. I am playing with scales a bit.
YC: I once saw images of your murals, and I like how you embed your small-scale paintings within the spatial ones.
JM: I like the idea that you can be inside the painting. I'm interested in there being no difference between public and private space, and that even private moments can seem confrontational or public.
YC: It seems there are usually multiple layers in your paintings. There are always other things happening, perhaps kind of unexpected, or another scene is going on in the background.
JM: That's something that I like about a book that I always reference, The Books of Jacob, by the Polish writer Olga Tokarczuk. She takes every single second to add detail, layer, and story. Someone could walk through a field, and there'll be daisies on the floor, and it will write someone's name, and then she'll come out of the field, and there'll be a feather stuck to her leg. The detail is completely out of control. And that's what I aspire to do with paintings. And one thing I'm interested in with the paintings is that the negative space and the room is treated the same as the figures. So there's this unified intensity, even though the faces and the hands have reference images. So I don't want a hierarchy between any of the figures. At that point I don't want the idea that there's a main character. But there's always somebody, at least one or two, staring outside. I always feel like the staring is more like a cat. You know, when a cat looks at you, you don't know what they're thinking, but you just sort of accept their look. And it's slightly other. I do consider the figures to be slightly other.
This body of work was all made this year, and there are characters that pop up in different paintings, but there's no main character, really. I kind of used the example talking about the book, The Castle of Crossed Destinies by the Italian writer Italo Calvino. Basically, people travel to this castle through a forest, and they get there to the great gall, but lose the power of speech. They want to tell each other the stories of how they got to the castle and find some tarot cards on the table, so they use them to tell the stories because they've got pictures. Their stories all interlink, and people reappear in other people's stories. When I have a character appear over there, it's not necessarily like a linear story across the paintings. They are appearing differently in some way.
YC: Your paintings often seem to have a sense of mysterious storytelling. Do you write stories yourself?
JM: I can’t write stories at all but I save the titles all the time, and lots of them are instructions or comments, or generally conversational. I built a story around maybe 20 titles, in which had a lot of people bustling in corridors and getting in each other's way. The painting The Swoon is a reference to teenage girls' hysteria. The women figures were acting like they had a hive mind, almost as if they were one. But then they disappear out and become individuals, then come back into this hive mentality. I'm interested in bed scenes, historically, because I like Italian fresco paintings from mediaeval times.
YC: Your paintings do remind me of Titian’s and Manet’s famous bed scenes and some pre-Raphaelite paintings.
JM: My paintings obviously reference the mythological subject matter, but I'm actually more interested in folklore, and more local stories, or mixing it all together. Are they caring for each other? Are they bothering each other?
YC: I wonder if there is any folklore you're reading or thinking about recently.
JM: There is a really good book Tyll by Daniel Kehlmann, and it tells the folklore from German history called Till Eulenspiegel. He’s a jester type figure and the book is quite interesting because it tells his story from everybody else's perspective by his own, and it's set against the backdrop of the 40 years German war.
In Jan Scankmejer’s film Little Otik, there is a story that a woman can't have a baby, and her husband goes and digs up a root in the garden, which looks like a baby. He gives it to his wife and she treats it like a baby and it grows bigger and bigger.
I quite like the way all these stories have different versions all over the world. And in folklore there's like no sense of morality there's no like right or wrong.
YC: You have mentioned many references; for your painting, do you usually refer to a story you have read or if you mix them and think of a new one?
JM: I don't generally tend to directly reference. When I talk about, like, the books and things that I'm interested in, it's more a way to describe how I might have come to the point of making these paintings. So it's very rare that I would illustrate something I read. But then it usually, like, morphs into something else.
I also look at historical prints and mainly European drawings from the 1600s to 1800s. I suppose I prefer to use prints and drawings for figure relationships and inspiration rather than photographs. And I like to kind of misunderstand it in some ways and view it from my perspective and mix it up with things going on in my life.
YC: Since you’ve mentioned gardens, and your paintings have many vegetal scenes, I wonder if you have ever learnt botany or if you go to gardens quite often. I’m also thinking about the figures in your painting that have skins of flowers, dew, and fur. How did you start applying these particular motifs?
JM: I recently read the Olivia Laing book that she just wrote, The Garden Against Time, and it's a bit of a history of the English garden. It's somewhat political, because there were lots of gardens that were made during the period where huge amounts of money was coming in from slaveries. In England, lots of the poorer people were able to grow crops on land that was later enclosed by the rich landowners, and so they lost where they were able to grow their farms. The idea of who owns the land and who can grow things where they like has changed a lot in history and the ideas around these 18th-century gardens where they would sort of get all the villagers to move out and then build these huge sweeping grass hills. If you think about them in terms of how much water they need, how much care they need, and obviously there's also ideas of paradise. After I read this book, I was trying to make an effort to go to gardens like Sissinghurst, where Vita Sackville-West lived, Great Dixter, and Derek Jarman's house.
There are some figures that have the spirit like the particular skin. There's no differentiation between the color palette of the figures and the backgrounds. There's a kind of block coloring going on. I used to look at a lot of Persian miniatures painting and early Renaissance Italian paintings where they have these block colors in order to differentiate figures from one another. I would like to start patterning the figures and try to get them dressed somehow, but making up clothes wasn't really working so much in a picture. So I'd start making all these furs or grasses. The grass actually came from real grass that I saw in Tuscany when I was in the residence there last year. I’m interested in how sometimes the carpet is fur and sometimes it's on the figure. Is it like a mirage or a disguise? What does it mean if it crosses over in terms of our relationship to space and our environment? It's also something to do with that and the kind of post-human ideas like Donna Haraway.
YC: I'm also fascinated with the half-animal, half-human characters there.
JM: I think sometimes it's just to solve a problem. To give a character a tail or something. But also I'm just trying to think about our responsibility. Like, how do we get into our environment in some way?
YC: Do you intentionally make the figure female and non-binary?
JM: I suppose I'm interested in decentering the male figure. It's not a totally super conscious decision that I'm not painting men. It's just that they turn out to be mainly women, or sometimes they're more androgynous. When you have a male and a female figure together, the stories automatically go into the relationship between them. So if you take that out somewhat, you can then have different stories that aren't romantic love or power in the same way. I don't know whether it's because I'm a woman that I get asked this question or if it's something that the figures in the painting are presenting that causes people to ask this. And the history of painting is women. It’s the never-ending question.
YC: You once said that you have read Olga Tokarczuk, Silvia Federici, and Hang Kang too. It’s so interesting how these authors write about the historical and social situations of being female, especially how their experience is related to natural phenomena.
JM: Someone yesterday was saying that the paintings look religious because of the flowers and leaves. It looked like Adam and Eve. I definitely wasn't coming from that. But obviously, Paradise in the Garden is a reference in some way. But I'm more interested in Milton's Paradise Lost, maybe, and the kind of stories that come back. Olivia Laing’s book talks about it a bit: the idea of the garden as the provider and the thing that you care for.