Eleanor Jones: Germination
Artist profile 9
A few weeks ago, I came across an exhibition in Birmingham by artist Gemma Marmalade about queer botany. Working from a 1970’s study of a commune of lesbian gardeners, Marmalade, over the past few years, has been exploring the idea that a gardener’s sexuality has a bearing on the success of their plants. The queerer you are, the better you garden grows. The work has a scientific basis, based on the study of pheromones, but the centrepiece of the exhibition was a tongue-in-cheek video, a how-to guide for queer botany. Life isn’t a picnic if you’re queer, but you can be guaranteed success when growing marrows.
The idea that sexuality and gender is linked to the garden is an old one. Women have been compared to flowers since time immemorial. Seeds and roots and shoots serve as metaphors in fiction time and time again, standing in for conception, growth, personal betterment. In the western (and predominantly christian) world, gender divides into binary opposites in a garden: Eve biting the apple, Eve throwing humanity from paradise. Roses, the valentine flower of choice, still function as a visual stand-in for woman. Flower arranging, to the victorians, was a language in itself, a coded gesture. Violets are symbolically linked to lesbians via the greek poet Sappho.
The work of Eleanor Jones springs forth from this conception of gendered nature. Floral imagery is heavy in her work, and her writing speaks of cultivation and growth. It occupies a different space, however, than the visual shorthand of blooms. Instead, it sits somewhere below the soil, combining the soft aesthetic of the floral with something more grotesque, more conflicting.
In her 1993 book The Monstrous Feminine, Barbara Creed wrote about the abject as antithesis to the subject, the place ‘where meaning collapses’. She talked about the repulsion of bodily waste in the context of gender, identifying hair and pus and blood as objects of the maternal universe, a ‘universe without shame’, linked to a more primal stage of human growth. The rejection of this matter as we grow, she argued, was a symbol of moving into the paternal universe, one that wishes to impose order and form on the world by conceptualising bodily function into language. Bodily waste threatens the self, representing as it does primitivism and a lack of civilisation. This socialised hatred of waste played a key part on the representation of women in horror films — Stephen King’s Carrie, for example, which plays on the fear and taboo of menstruation.
Eleanor Jones’ work takes this repulsion and plays it against a hyper-feminine aesthetic, offsetting pretty with disgust. In a piece from earlier this year, an amber-tinged glass goblet is placed on a piece of draped fabric that looks invitingly soft. Inside the goblet are a few small plastic-wrapped objects that, from a distance, resemble sweets. But get close, and the fabric is merely printed to look soft, and inside the twists of clingfilm are balls of hair. From far away, the work is comfortingly domestic. Up close, it evokes disgust, displaying matted hair in the manner of food.
Many of her pieces play with this juxtaposition. In But why, hair, why are you everywhere?, soft, felted wool is bound in intestine-like links that are a delicate pink, the colour of candyfloss. This snakes across a large pink and green flower, resembling in altar, with wilting fabric flowers placed in PVC tubes at the sides like devotional candles. Some of these woollen intestines end in PVC flowers, stuffed with more wool. Writing about her work, Eleanor explains that the process of making comes from the transformation of obsessive drawings to human-scale sculptures, things that are tactile and capable of being held. These sculptures are pieces that touch upon the trauma of an operation in early 2015, and explore, simultaneously, revulsion and loss. In the 1966 book Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution in Taboo, Mary Douglas identifies ritual practices as a way to identify power and truth in ‘the disorder of the mind’, a way to make sense of what lies without of society. Eleanor’s work explores this on a smaller, more personal scale, attempting to reconcile the stuff of the body — hair, and organs — with the accepted aesthetics of femininity and religious devotion.
This act of turning obsessive drawings — which are reminiscent of Louise Bourgeois’ Insomnia Drawings — into small, tactile sculpture is a recurring theme in Eleanor’s work. Her Birdworld pieces translate some of these sketches into fabric pieces with pockets and inviting folds. The drawings themselves have some recognisable features — eyelashes, tongues, beaks — but when distilled further into soft sculpture, they become more abstract, their scale and texture suggesting more about the human body. They are reminiscent of the products of Giant Microbes, a company that makes plush, cuddly replicas of microscopic organisms.
Eleanor’s artist statement makes a direct connection between nature and the feminine, quoting Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden: ‘She should never forget that first morning when her garden began to grow.’ In her work, the floral and the earthly are visual analogies for the body and the personal. A hyper-feminine aesthetic is offset by references to that which is deemed socially unacceptable. Further on in her statement, she describes her work as a test of the understanding she has of herself, and of ‘increasingly perceived notions of the female body’. By making work at the weak point between civilisation and the uncivilised, between the public and the private, these sculptural pieces certainly challenge these considerations.
You can see more of her work here:
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Text by Julia Barbour.
