Connectedness

Purposefully casting her net wide on a recce to the Glasgow site, Jo Ball Instagram dm’s me with an invitation to meet for coffee and conversation. Strangers related by practice and community converge with few clues to aid recognition, but as promised chat ensues and similitude comes to light, the aggregate of unseen threads & imaginative projection – ‘visible, invisible, like those threads, now seen, now not, that unite trembling grass blades in autumn before the sun rise’ (Woolf, V. Between the Acts). Friends, children, showing, & growing, recalled in imprecise ways – and with perplexing familiarity close to déjà-vu, that reorders & discredits faith in memory.

Jo’s profile describes her as Artist and Gardener. Currently based in Bristol, Jo graduated from Tapestry at Edinburgh College of Art 20 years ago, only recently returning to Scotland to visit. Her focus on her own art practice (making the distinction from her work in the garden for the moment) surfaced, or more accurately was reactivated at about the time her son Ben was born, at a juncture that would almost certainly have forced a realignment in self-perception. Far from limiting her art making, the practice of parenting it seems created a site for empowerment.

Verge: An extreme limit beyond which something specified will happen.

The Verge is a brownfield garden and project space established by artist Mary Redmond (Glasgow), giving a once derelict site new purpose to benefit nature and the community through ruderal planting and sculptural intervention. In the collected works, Remember Nature, Brian Eno asks us ‘For one week, think about everything you do in terms of whether it strengthens or erodes community’. Here under a rail bridge in Yorkhill is a narrow moment between park and expressway, the confluence of the river Kelvin & Clyde, offering an invitation to proximity and connectedness.

Points of attachment is a work made specifically for The Verge. It is composed of four large nets, constructed from naturally dyed cotton rope, some in plain colours & some striped. ‘I discovered that by unravelling thicker rope, three twisted stands produced dyed spirals around the individual strands,’ Jo explains. Made at home, nets reach horizontally across shelving and kitchen table; when on the site they are suspended vertically, utilising pre-existing attachment points. The title of the work refers to attachment theory (as observed in the work of British Psychologists John Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth) & in a general sense to lasting connectedness between human beings.

I imagine the process of making each net by hand to be reassuringly regular for Jo, firming up thought in each repeat. Jo’s body shapes the work as she winds the dyed rope, an end on one hand, around the v of that thumb and forefinger, down to the elbow and back up the make the loops. The drawing out of rope becomes net, line becomes enclosure, via the process of knotting - controlling, registering & bonding; a pause before the line overtakes the lump and continues, is sustained and hopeful. As in the work of Eve Hesse & Robert Morris before her, Jo’s work happens in the act of formation. It exists on site in one form but is mutable according to the effects of the gravity & stress on her simple materials. Antidote to a less intuitive, more easily definable, hierarchical notion, by which a process leads logically to a solution.

For Jo, the environment is clearly collaborator, second cousin to other gardens she has laboured in, each square net a viewfinder of time (her routine) and space (her ecology). Against the brick on site, I imagine net units even in their provisionality, providing tempting footholds for climbing children or enthusiastic tendrils hungry for light. As Artist and Gardener, Jo has a heightened sensitivity and deference to the temporality of site and material, where many an artist at some point has a desire for duration, if not legacy. Kathryn, my mother-in-law is a gardener. I ask her what the practice teaches you – ‘how to observe, compose, accept the cycle of life and death, ultimately to grow’ she answers, ‘the process is always new, humbling; composting is decay and is also life giving’. Participating in an active site, the Artist-gardener nudges an ongoing process, rather than imposing matter and form as in Aristotle’s hylomorphic model.

Looking back on Jo’s early work made in 2013, arrangements of ephemeral natural materials (string, wool, wood, dried flowers, berries) are posed figuratively, wired together loosely with impudent lightness, existing only for the moment of the exhibition in her London flat, bringing nature inside. The 2013 exhibition included an early net in this case made from barely visible filament florist wire. Jo tells me she has made nets for years and sees them as a metaphor for the way memory acts. What gets lodged permanently and why some things slip away.

While in Glasgow, Jo remembers her grandfather figure, Gordon, with great fondness. A member of the merchant navy he would have docked in nearby Yorkhill quay. For Jo, there’s some discomfort in describing the work as representational, but in setting the gauge for each square by the length of adult and child forearms, the 4 nets, at a moment along the line, became a family. Forming a personal and shifting topography, the net is cellular, potentially infinite; far from simple outline it is complex container of imprecise ecosystems, a quilt pieced together by our antecedents.

I want to share this emptiness with you

Not fill the silence with false notes

Or put tracks through the void

I want to share this wilderness of failure

The others have built you a highway fast lane in both directions

I offer you a journey without direction

Uncertainty and no sweet conclusion

Here Michael Gough narrates as kaleidoscopic images materialise in Derek Jarman’s The Garden (1990). At Jarman’s Prospect Cottage this garden is, like The Verge, an unconventional plot. It runs all the way to the horizon in every direction without fences or walls. The nuclear power station at the end provides an atmospheric and unsettling low hum. Its glow by night illuminates the landscape & is a feature of it. Unlike in the gallery, light levels outside transform the colours of flowers, surface textures of leaves, transform material substance, affecting design to convey drama, motion and evoke emotion.

In the final scenes orange flickering before end credits roll like premonitions. Flash back to devastating forest fires ripping through acres of California, Brazil, Australia, & France, as temperatures rise, with unprecedented numbers of blazes breaking out in the UK this year. The notion of garden is upended. It becomes a stage where everything is both significant and inconsequential. At this moment in our history, at the brink of ecological ruin, I have an idea of this place - The Verge - aware of its own temporality, collaborative in its animacy, hopeful in its creativity, obstinately inconclusive.

Sara Barker

July 2022

Jo Ball is an Artist and Gardener based in Bristol. Her BA in Tapestry at Edinburgh College of Art was followed by an MFA at Studio Arts, Montreal. She is currently showing in the exhibition ‘Nature our environment’, at Kingshill House from 16th July – 24th September 2022. Later in 2022 she will begin a commission at Mangotsfield Folly, on the Bristol-Bath cycle path - planting hundreds of spring bulbs to be sung to when they flower the following spring. Recent projects include: Summer Residency at the Garage (2021), Arts Council DYCP (2021), Patches of Blue Sky at OSR Projects (2017) and Transition residency at Newlyn Art Gallery (2017)