Artist Jessy Boon Cowler Explores Exotism And Places

Jessy Boon Cowler is a photographic artist whose collage work reinvents the human form by positioning them amongst landscapes close to her heart. Boon Cowler’s art transports fleshy figures into settings that instantly feel comforting and sunny but, on closer inspection, are a question about the interaction between people and places. By focusing on the environments of her home in South London and her connections to Latin America, Boon Cowler inadvertently addresses the separation between humanity and the natural world by turning spines into horizons and torsos into trees. At the root of her work sits a deep awareness of the physicality of people and the ways in which unity can be encouraged between countries, cultures and characters. We asked Jessy to tell us more about her motivations for making, and her reflections on how education has fuelled her focus today.

Could you tell us about your introduction to photography and art, and what led you to pursue a creative career?

My family are very creative - none of them have had creative careers but seemingly for generations they’ve been paving the way for me, my siblings and cousins. Through internal migration, aspiration and progressive tendencies, my very working class roots have allowed me a good education and the attitude that it’s not where you’re from but where you’re headed. I feel lucky to have grown up in a time where film and processing was cheap, so I’d always get through a roll or two of 35mm when I was on holiday as a kid - usually visiting my grandparents in Andalucia - and that’s had a huge influence on the way I shoot now.

With colour and collage enriching your work, could you give us some insight into your process of making?

My work is very process-led and I often find meaning in retrospect. I’ll realise that the themes I’m working with visually are things I’ve been obsessing over, often subconsciously, for months or even years. I really work intuitively and just go with what feels right, and then start a process of refinement. I’ll usually just follow an impulse to do something and kind of see what happens.

You’ve noted that your work is a way to explore the separation between the physical and intellectual world. What was the starting point for this focus?

I think most of my work is born out of some kind of frustration. I’ve now spent 10 years studying art at varying levels and as much as I must love academia, or I wouldn’t have committed so much time and money to it, I feel like it’s lacking in so many ways. I hate that intellectuals so often look down on the physical as somehow base - I think the physical and the intellectual are two parts of a whole. You can’t live without these dualities and one is no more important than the other. We exist as cerebral and corporal beings so both elements should be given an equal footing culturally. I think in Britain and the global north we place too much emphasis on the intellectual and that imbalance leads to a physical kind of frustration and dismisses too many other types of intelligence as low-brow. Physical, emotional, spatial and creative intelligence are just as important as intellect.

““Almost all the problems we are facing as a species stem from our inability to see things from a wider perspective. We are part of a much larger and complex system than we tend to think about daily - socially, environmentally, globally, universally.””

How do your day to day interactions and social environments impact the concepts and messages you cite in your art?

I’m from London, one of the most global and diverse metropolises in the world. And luckily a very green one. My grandparents moved to the south of Spain when I was very young, just within my memory, and that movement and mix of cultures from my childhood has had a huge impact on me. London is amazing but it does lack a warmth, both literally and emotively. I crave the horizon, the sea and social warmth that you find in Andalucia, which I see as my second home. This feeling of lack has taken me on many adventures in Latin America, which if I can be so audacious as to generalise, is a continent and a half united by a fierce connection to nature. They place a huge importance on social and spiritual connection, which I do feel we lack in the global north. We’re really seeing the devastating impact of this with the rise of the extreme right, denial of climate change and the capitalist ideology of placing economic growth over social and environmental health.

The way you portray bodies segmented and interacting with one another has an overarching feeling of sensuality. How has your relationship with your own body impacted the way you choose to present flesh and naked human forms?

It’s a struggle for a lot of women when your body suddenly and unwillingly becomes an object of desire. It can be empowering and a lot of fun, of course, but female sexuality is still such a taboo. So many young women see their bodies as a tool for male satisfaction that it can take a lot of un-learning to find a balanced way to appreciate your body. Our bodies are functional machines that need a lot of looking-after, and one of their myriad functions is pleasure. Pleasure doesn’t always mean sex, and by no means do I want to discredit sex but I think more of an emphasis should be put on sensuality that is not just sexual - movement, dance, platonic touch. Prioritising somatics over performative physicality. I think a lot of other cultures have a much healthier relationship to physicality, sensuality and sexuality. We have a reputation for being very prudish in Britain.

Focusing on Postcards from Pachamama, you have chosen to use parts of the body but never do we see the face or full form of a person. Could you talk us through these creative decisions?

As I’ve mentioned, I work very intuitively and I never exactly sat down and decided to abstract the body in the way I do. Retrospectively I can see that probably subconsciously, as I’m more interested in a broad idea of celebrating sensuality and physicality and less about individualism, I’ve taken away the elements that make a body too recognisable in the hope that they can become more universal and relatable.

““I wanted to either make work that was about something universal that I was a part of, or be empowering others to be sharing their own visions””

Could you tell us more about the exoticism foreigners are inclined to place on other countries and how this fueled your artwork?

I can only talk from personal experience, and I happen to have been born in a country which was once the largest Empire in history. Considering that fact, we didn’t get taught much about the impacts of colonisation when I was at school so a lot of my learning about this has been through visiting places and piecing things together myself. It’s a pretty overwhelming thing to learn about as a young adult. For instance, I’d always heard of this romanticised colonial architecture you find in foreign countries. In the UK you have Tudor, Victorian and Edwardian architecture. In so many other places you get the Colonial architecture. Then you start considering the meaning of that and it’s just so dark. There is nothing romantic about it at all. Sure, these cities are beautiful but where is the rhetoric around the cost of this beauty for indigenous people? You have to look for it yourself. You pay to go to museums to see the indigenous relics left in these colonial cities. It’s a mess. I don’t think you can ever truly get away from exoticisation though, something and somewhere is always going to be foreign to someone. I think it’s about always trying to have an understanding of, and respect for, where you are. I’m totally guilty of romanticising other countries and cultures but I hope it’s more about my thirst to experience the world in all its forms rather than a kind of exotic objectification or othering.

Your work is “a campaign to see ourselves as part of a greater whole”. Please expand on why this is important to you and your art?

Well, talking of othering, I think almost all the problems we are facing as a species stem from our inability to see things from a wider perspective. We are part of a much larger and complex system than we tend to think about daily - socially, environmentally, globally, universally. I get frustrated in the city because you often can’t see the horizon or the moon - when I see these things it jolts me into a certain perspective, seeing what an incredible context I am within. It blows my mind that some people see human beings as something apart from nature, above or other than. It’s just not possible to detach ourselves from. It’s like denying that you’re made from a cluster of cells. When you do put yourself in that wider context it just becomes even more absurd that we have all these divisions within ourselves as a species - where someone was born, who someone loves, the way someone chooses to express that love, the colour of someone's skin and so on. These diversities should be celebrated for the beautiful manifestation of life that they are, they should be studied in wonder and awe and put on a pedestal and celebrated. We are so similar, these differences are so minute and adorable. So that’s what I’m trying to do with some of my work.

What role does collaboration play in the work you make and the imagery you share?

I don’t think any individual can credit themselves alone for the work they make, like we can’t separate ourselves from our environment. When I first started travelling in Latin America I was taking snapshots that were lovely but one dimensional. I quickly realised I didn't want to be taking pictures of ‘the other’ - I wanted to either make work that was about something universal that I was a part of, or be empowering others to be sharing their own visions, so I started collaborating with NGOs to run participatory workshops with people from disadvantaged communities. I first started working with Casa B in Bogota, Colombia in 2015, which quickly became a photographic exchange project between children in Mexico and Bolivia too - giving children their own cameras, documenting their own environments and having an insight into the lives of other children making the same kind of work. Around the same time I began working with the Helen Bamber Foundation, doing similar participatory facilitation with refugees and asylum seekers who have been victims of human cruelty. These experiences have brought some incredible individuals into my life who have really helped me on this creative journey. We are individuals with our unique and beautiful idiosyncrasies but we don’t exist without these fundamental relationships with other humans and the world around us. Just like we can't exist without the air we breathe, the water we drink, the food we eat and the rock we revolve on. We don’t exist outside of our contexts.

Could you name five female artists whose work inspires you?

Cristina de Middel, a wonderful Spanish photographer who blurs fact and fiction. Her work is very intelligent and humorous, and I really admire her attitude and approach. Viviene Sassen is another photographer that I adore - how she has such integrity and artistic overlap in the commercial work she makes, and such a fluid and distinctive way of working. Sofia Crespo is a visual artist working with neural networks exploring the relationship between the natural and the artificial in a much more technologically advanced way than I could ever dream of. I’m obsessed with marine life and ‘artificial’ creativity and therefore with her work. Lousie Bourgeois for her fierce and unapologetic approach to making work, she just never stopped, she lived and breathed it. Also her very honest and psychoanalytic way of talking about what she did and why. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie whose work I have devoured this year - thanks for keeping me entertained and educated.

Follow Jessy Boon Cowler on Instagram @jessybooncowler

Credits

• Interviewed by Bethany Burgoyne

• Producer: Mariam Mugambwa