Praying with my Fingers: Redux

In losing part of my eyesight I discovered that my perceptions of reality were, and had always been, illusions.

That I sometimes cannot see what I am looking at, and am compelled to rely more on what I can feel, underscore a poignant link between personal experience and abstract, transpersonal, metaphors. This link is intrinsic to both artistic and spiritual inquiries. Both fuel my search for equanimity and insight; both reveal their own peculiar occlusions and perceptual distortions.

My approach to art-making is a many-tiered quest for guidance into my artistic, spiritual, and cultural identities as a woman, and traces my efforts to feel for often-invisible structures that shape—or distort—women’s self perceptions.

Perceived through the lenses of art, spiritual practice, and cultural assumptions about woman-hood, concepts of desire, passion, and creativity can become conflicted, or even thwarted. I explore these states through using such disparate materials as tea leaves, white latex house paint, and hot glue. Materials, like yearnings, are stuffed away and yet relentlessly obtrude. White paint effaces and cracks. Hot glue sears and fuses. Tea leaves clot, mottle, and stain. Life’s flow is excerpted and discarded in the unseen periphery.

More than mere portrayals of obscure frustration my works are soft-fingered, wordless acts of tenderness and mending. By reconnecting to an experiential source where metaphor and material conjoin, “I see” becomes “I feel” supplanting the visual hubris of knowing with the ambiguity of faith in what I can touch and what touches me.

Jo Jackson

To see more of Jo's work visit:
www.moejo.com