Dip the fabric in a bath of onion skins, like she did. Let the dye cling like her ghost clings to me and to her old furniture, which has become mine, the headboard shaky as names being called, my name over and over. I cannot answer to it. Dip the fabric in a bath of onion skins. I cannot forget her ghost in front of the mirror. I realize her face is framed by my hair. She wanders the maze of armchairs. I fold my body over hers on one of the cushions. She clings to me. There is the end table that was carried with her from the farm where they first settled. Then she opened the window for the first calm in a long time. She felt the discomfort of knowing her family was not part of her peace. This scared her and so did the way their ghosts cling.
I work with art in reaction to poetry. I find textiles work best since they are malleable and react to embroidery, dye, and wax. This helps me focus my poetry. Sometimes I rework the poetry after the textile is completed to create a stronger connection. -Olena Jennings
The idea begins here with collecting onion skins for about a year. They crackle and crunch against each other as thin as a spirit.
The title of the poem “Historical Arrangement” is about the ghost who is a deceased family member, and the voice in the poem is becoming one with history. What is remarkable is that the voice has her furniture and is taking on her features.
The art, a woman’s shirt, is part of the poem because this family member is dyeing with onion skins. The voice in the poem is repeating her acts. My ancestor used onion skins to dye eggs, but I carried the process into my present by dyeing fabric.
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Olena Jennings is a New York City based writer and translator. She is the author of the poetry collection The Age of Secrets (Lost Horse Press, 2022) and the novel Temporary Shelter (Cervena Barva Press, 2021). Olena Jennings has been a translator or co-translator of collections by Ukrainian poets Iryna Shuvalova, Kateryna Kalytko, Vasyl Makhno, and Yuliya Musakovska, among others. She also founded and curates the Poets of Queens reading series and press.
The pandemic lockdown saw the creation of all kinds of things we never would have imagined, such as new best friends you’ve never met, and the ultimate oxymoron: Zoom life drawing.
Life drawing, of course, means ‘from life’. As in the person you are drawing is in front of you. Which, sadly, was not exactly possible during the lockdown. Undeterred (and unemployed), enterprising life models began broadcasting sessions on Zoom from their homes using their phones, with some even setting up elaborate painted backgrounds.
At first, all of this was just temporary, until we could all draw in person again. But as the months became years, worldwide drawing communities developed, crossing time and space boundaries, and, for once, not being limited to models physically present in the area. So when lockdown ended, we still wanted to see our friends AND draw the best models from around the world, even if they were on a screen and you couldn’t choose the angle, so the Zoom sessions persisted.
I personally also didn’t want to give up being able to paint from home without having to lug twenty pounds of supplies across town without a car and having to compete with a dozen other artists for an unobstructed view of the model.
Fast forward four years. I’ve done hundreds of Zoom life drawing sessions with models I have never met in person, despite having drawn them for years. It’s an extremely strange relationship of intimacy. On the one hand, I know the contours of their bodies in great detail. But I don’t know basic things like how tall they are, or their relative size in proportion to “my basic unit of measurement:me”. These things can’t be determined on Zoom.
Let me just mention here that for whatever reason, there is a very large number of Zoom life models based in Buenos Aires, Argentina. There are just a handful of models from all other countries on the Zoom circuit, but I counted 26 models from Buenos Aires that I have drawn on Zoom.
The confluence of several unrelated events brought me to Buenos Aires in October 2024. The timing was determined by the2024 Urban Sketchers Symposium, which was held in Buenos Aires from October 9-12. While I was not planning to attend the Symposium, many friends from around the world would be there for the event, and sketching together is a lot of fun. But it’s still a long way to travel, so I needed more motivation to make the trip.
This was provided by a mural painting micro residency at Proyecto’ace, which runs the Palimpsest Project, a mural collaboration over time, where new work is interwoven into the existing murals, instead of painting over them entirely. I like this non-destructive approach, and since I hadn’t previously done any mural painting, I thought this would be a good introduction.
For the mural project, I envisioned a collage of figure drawings, begun during Zoom sessions, and continuing to my time in Buenos Aires, where I would draw the same models in life, thereby adding a layer of time and space. The final mural incorporated only a single figure, my friend Eliana, painted from Zoom the previous year, into the existing mural. While I painted Eliana in various aspects while in Buenos Aires, it was the painting that I had brought for her as a gift that turned out to be the best fit for the mural.
While the artistic experience helped to expand my horizons, introducing me to new media and ways of working, the best part of the trip really was the opportunity to meet some of my favorite life models in real life. It was a bit like meeting a movie star, and chatting like you’ve known each other for years (which technically you have). I did experience the odd sensation of looking up and thinking that the person in front of me really looks like their Zoom persona. Except for the height.
The pandemic lockdown saw the creation of all kinds of things we never would have imagined, such as new best friends you’ve never met, and the ultimate oxymoron: Zoom life drawing.
As the life models themselves admit, you just put the camera on the floor if you want to make yourself look taller, so almost everyone ended up being much shorter than I had imagined. And while I’ve always heard that the camera adds 10 pounds, I’ve never had to subtract those 10 pounds in my imagination–especially not from someone who already looks tiny on Zoom. They turn out to be the size of a child in real life. Quite the surprise for someone from the U.S., where being big is totally normalized. It was a good reminder that the entire rest of the world is not like us.
This is the story of how a trip to the 14th Gwangju Biennale in May 2023 led me to throw 10 paintings out of my second story window like Rapunzel’s hair.
When I was doing my MFA, I led a graduate seminar on the art biennale phenomenon, and have been slowly making my way to as many of them as possible ever since. A last minute opportunity to visit Korea gave me the chance to see this year’s iteration of the Gwangju Biennale, titled “Soft and weak like water.”
Gwangju Biennale May 2023
Gwangju is in southwestern South Korea, about a 2-hour train ride south of Seoul. It is considered the cradle of Korean democracy due to the 5.18 Gwangju Uprising, a pro-democracy popular uprising in May 1980 that was brutally suppressed by the military regime with the loss of up to 2,000 lives. After democracy was restored in 1987, the biennale was founded in 1995 to commemorate the spirit of the uprising and celebrate the city’s cultural heritage.
This year’s artistic director, Sook-Kyung Lee, senior curator of international art at Tate Modern (and soon-to-be director of the Whitworth Gallery in Manchester), is the event’s first Korean artistic director since Kim Hong-hee in 2006.
The title “Soft and weak like water” comes from the Tao Te Ching, and according to Lee, “is about the paradoxical power of seemingly weak things, referring to the transformative nature of water that could break hard things like rocks or change the course of a river over a long period of time.”
Beyond the exhibition in main biennale hall, smaller exhibitions and country pavilions were housed in a multiple venues across town. My favorite was the Horanggasy Art Polygon, a glass pavilion located on the edge of a forest on Yangnim mountain. Walking up the winding alleys of the Yangnim-dong neighborhood felt like wandering around on the nostalgic streets of a Hayao Miyazaki film, with its mix of traditional Korean architecture and turn-of-the-century Western-style houses, now full of small galleries and tea rooms.
Vivian Suter installation view.
Inside the glass pavilion, I encountered for the first time in-person the work of Argentine-Swiss artist Vivian Suter. Suter is the subject of Rosalind Nashashibi’s 2017 short film Vivian’s Garden (one of two films that earned Nashashibi a Turner Prize nomination in 2017). The film is set in the jungle near Lake Atitlan in Guatemala, where Suter has lived and worked for four decades. A flood in her studio in 2005 caked all of her work in mud, and after recovering from the initial shock, Suter discovered that rather than destroying her paintings, nature had simply become part of them, and her practice subsequently incorporated the mud and rain and plants and insects and dog paw prints that are part of her lived environment directly into the paintings.
What was most prominent when entering the pavilion was the smell of the paintings. This I did not expect. The enclosed space did not smell mildly of oil paint and gesso and canvas. Instead, you could breathe in the earth and rain that had seeped into the vast concentration of hanging cloth paintings. I had never experienced paintings as an olfactory sensation before.
What I had done was experience music as painting. Specifically, the 1,027 opera broadcasts I listened to during Covid lockdown were distilled into the 18 paintings of the series I called “Synaesthesia” (2022). Synesthesia is perceiving something in one of the senses and simultaneously feeling it in another.
Kandinsky famously dropped out of law school to study painting after attending a performance of Wagner’s opera Lohengrin, where, he later said, “I saw all my colors in spirit, before my eyes. Wild, almost crazy lines were sketched in front of me.”
Each of my paintings are a visual profile of the music of an opera character. In some cases, I painted specific interpreters of those roles. The paintings are acrylic on unstretched canvas, 3 to 4 feet high and about 4½ feet wide. When I got home from Korea, I decided to hang all of them up in my apartment, like in the Suter exhibition. But instead of attaching them to beams in the ceiling or to track lighting (I don’t have either), I attached them to each other, and ultimately hung them off the balconies around my split-level apartment complex. In homage to Kandinsky, I picked out the 10 Wagner opera characters to display.
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