Magical Plants, Multitasking & A Sense of Complete Focus

Breast Is Best, 2020, Oil and acrylic on linen, 55 x 45 cm, Mother Nature series

GM: In your most recent bodies of work The Witch’s Garden and Mother Nature, two different series of botanical-motif paintings act as conduits for subtle yet complex emotional states that ooze through the abstract and figurative negotiations occurring in perfect stillness inside portrait-like frames. 

The botanical elements in your paintings seem to have been removed from their original histories and time periods to inhabit cartoon-like, almost plasticized hermetic environments, where they perform solo or in pairs, uninhibited. The plant as protagonist seems to puncture the landscape with its form, and everything seems infused with an eerily sweet tone of 90s digitality and the blurred palette of a 1950s linoleum kitchen.

I am thinking about the difference between working directly from plants VS working from photographs or other representations of plants in relation to your work, and how both the tradition of botanical outdoor painting and indoor botanical studies through history are riddled with gendered and colonial associations that one could choose to incorporate, push against, deny, denounce, etc. I am thinking about this as I read some of your titles, ‘Breast is Best’, ‘Milk of Paradise’. I wonder if you could talk a bit about these last two bodies of work and their relation to the tradition of botanical painting. 

JHG: I don’t think of the work as coming directly out of the tradition though of course it owes something to the practice. I am really interested in women like Marianne North and Mary Delany who produced incredible botanical works, totally against the odds. Marianne North was a Victorian botanical artist and biologist who traveled the world painting plants and landscapes, mostly solo which was of course very unusual as a woman in the 19th century. She started painting them after her mother died and her painting practice was compounded after her father died not that long after. There is a whole gallery dedicated to her work at Kew Gardens with the walls covered in her paintings. It is incredible to see not only how prolific she was but also the extent of her travels, having visited Syria, Japan, Java, Borneo and many other countries, which I like to think she did in full Victorian garb, which is always how you see her in photographs.  

Mary Delany was a collagist, born in 1700 who produced beautiful and very accurate works on paper using tissue paper that she either sourced or hand-coloured. She called them ‘paper-mosaics’ and they are totally exquisite. She made them from the age of 71-88 and was evidently deeply obsessed by the project as she made nearly 1,000 works by the time she’d finished due to her eyesight starting to fail. 

I am not painting plants for scientific use as a botanical illustrator or artist would do, or even creating works that accurately depict real botanical subjects. I am interested in how plants can stand in for something else and hopefully communicate subtle and complex affects as you describe above.

In regards to the titles, Breast is Best and Milk of Paradise, they reveal some of the more personal content behind the work. I made ‘Breast is Best’ just before the birth of my daughter. I had been reading about how difficult and painful breastfeeding can be at first for some women, so that painting was partly coming out of feelings of anxiety that I might not be able to feed my baby in the way I hoped to. The painting is of a cactus like plant that is made up of breast forms that have spikes protruding from the ‘nipples’, so if not aggressive, it’s certainly defensive. Thankfully, when it came to it I was able to breastfeed no problem!    

Milk of Paradise features an opium poppy and the title relates to a description of the latex, gum or ‘milk’ that is extracted from the plant through lancing the outer surface of the unripe pod, which then dries. I made 2 paintings based on this plant. The history of opium use is fascinating and heartbreaking. It has been used since 5000 BC. The ancient Egyptians used it, the Greeks and the Assyrians. In the 12th C it was used as a sophoriphic sponge in childbirth and was also applied directly to the vagina to ease sexual frustration. (I’m interested in the history of sex and how women’s needs and desires have often been discounted. Easing their ‘hysteria’ with opium is of course another example of this.) Kids were medicated with Laudnum up until the 1860s in the UK. The nation’s children were basically being drugged to ‘soothe’ them or keep them quiet. 

I made my 2 paintings at the height of the opioid crisis in America after being very moved by a programme I’d seen on TV about the extent and effects of this pharmaceutical drug on such huge numbers of people. Drug use and abuse is something that has very much affected me throughout my life and having had a close relative die from a heroin overdose, I understand how devastating addiction can be for an individual and their family. 

 

GM: Back to your paintings that I have been looking at through a screen in this year of lockdown, they feel very traditional yet very digitally influenced to me, holding both the talismanic feeling of small icons; each with its main character magnetically present in the center, and the feeling of a floating computerized suspension like a Pokémon game where the screen announces you have just engaged in battle after treading the digital high grass. For the first time you see your opponent clearly in all its detailed, emanating personality. This is of course a very subjective reading of your work, but from a distance, I can’t help but to make these associations. I wondered if you could shed light on the range of sources that inform these most recent paintings other than the botanical references we were just discussing.

JHG: I’ve never played Pokémon though I like the idea of treading the digital high grass! As you say, these pieces feature dreamlike plants in emptied out spaces. The lack of other details or objects allows for a complete focus on the plant. When I began, I was thinking of them as potential ingredients for love potions or spells. They were referencing herbal fertility guides and ancient spell books as well as other obscure plants I was coming across. The references became more broad as the series progressed and along the way I had a chance encounter with an amazing guy called, Dr. Henry Oakley who is the Garden Fellow at the Royal College of Physicians. He gives tours of their medicinal gardens. His passion and knowledge for the subject is incredible and I was totally enthralled by the stories and histories he recited about the things that grow there. There were things that he warned us not to touch, one of which would dilate your pupils for a week after coming into contact with it. We know that drugs are largely synthesised from the natural world but it’s still exciting to come across these things which look so ‘harmless’ but learn about how potent they are. After we met, he shared some different sources with me including a seventeenth century directory of plants and their properties that uses the most lovely old world language and has the most brilliant descriptions.  

I began making the Witch’s Garden series when my partner and I were trying for our first baby which took a little bit of time. I’m interested in the ways we attempt to treat and control our minds and bodies medicinally and recreationally and the way that desire, control and magical thinking feature in this. Trying for a baby is a huge decision and I thought a lot about the ways people will things to happen through their projection on to inanimate objects and the use of ritual. It’s one way we can feel to have some agency over the things which we have little control of. 

The works develop out of my own experience but are also sparked by the research that follows. Apollo’s Gift I, was the first painting I made in the series and is based on an extinct plant known as Silphium, reportedly used as an aphrodisiac and contraceptive as far back as 700 BC. One theory suggests this might be where the notorious heart-shaped symbol originates from as it is described as having a heart-shaped seed. I am a fan of sensationalist historical fake news, so I got really excited about this theory, despite it being tenuous!

The title for the series The Witch’s Garden came about as I was researching the history of midwives and their knowledge of the natural world. These women were often thought of as witches and were frequently older figures or poor widows, attempting to scratch out a living in their communities. Their solitary, vulnerable status and unusual knowledge made them perfect targets for the projection of other people’s rage and fear when crops failed or babies died. The images, ideas, experiences and histories that inform the work are quite wide ranging though pretty focussed in these recent bodies of work. 

 

GM: I am curious about what exhibitions and artists who have come to work with Block 336 in the last years have entered your thinking most when you are in the studio with your own practice recently. I’m sure this will change from time to time, but If you don’t mind, I would love to hear your take on this. Personally, one of the things I found most inspiring about Block 336 when I was in closer contact with it back in 2012/13, was how the process of investing time in another artist’s project and working to help it come to life was in fact incredibly enriching for whatever personal work I was developing in the studio. It seems really banal to write it but the spirit of seriousness towards creating community and the generosity engendered by Block 336 was vital for me to understand that it was possible to grow abundantly with other artists, not necessarily in competition but in dialogue.

JHG: Yes, that is exactly it – it is very enriching. It has allowed my practice and thinking to develop in interesting and unexpected ways. 

2020 was a crazy year for everyone and although we had two shows from 2019 continue into January, we only presented two new exhibitions last year. They were by Andy Holden and Tom Worsfold. They were very different in nature. We showed beautifully crafted, sensitive paintings by Tom that were very psychologically charged and a spectacular interactive installation by Andy. Andy’s exhibition radically developed through the process of working in the space (this is always what we hope will happen with the artists working with us) and significantly, he responded to a suddenly changed world and the new restrictions which came about as part of the pandemic. We were set to open a very different exhibition just before COVID hit in March but Andy recognised that it was no longer relevant in the right way so we shifted it considerably. I think the kind of uncompromising attitude that we see time and again at Block is really inspiring. Artists that keep on pushing to the very end.

 

Jane Hayes Greenwood
Block 336