Member-only story
Artists and Other Introverts
Solitude in the Studio
This week I spent some time thinking about the work of the American artist Joan Jonas. She’s not an artist I was very familiar with, and I’m annoyed with myself now that I missed a recent retrospective of her work at Tate Modern in 2018.
Jonas is 86 years old, and has had an extraordinary career. Back in the 1960s and 70s she was a pioneer of video and performance art but she also works in a range of media. I find it hard to pin down in words exactly what Jonas’s work is about, although running through it is an exploration of fairy tales and myths in a way that resonates with our contemporary experience of the world. Nature and her dogs feature a lot too.
If I had to summarise her work, I would say that she’s just simply curious about life and finds ways of grasping and expressing meaning. I know that’s a little bit nebulous, but oftentimes I find that meaning in art for me is clear as a bell one moment and then it’s gone. I love that about art: there’s a connection, a sense of clarity, in visual form that we can feel but we can’t necessarily translate into words.
Jonas talks about how her work explores the complex layering of our thoughts, and what she says is perhaps the closest that words can get to summarising it:
My work is all about layering, because…
