Artist / Writer / Publisher
ABOUT // NEWS
PUBLISHING // CV
PUBLISHING // CV
Time is a crucial element to Jacinda Russell, who dramatically shifted her work in 2016 to leave behind familiar, and personal, subject matter. “After the election,” she says, “I really began to wonder why I was creating such autobiographical art, and how I could make a broader, bigger statement. I started thinking about the environment, how that was something that I felt very close to and could [work] with.”* This turn to the environment led her to her current, peripatetic practice. She began to rely on research, travel, grants, and years of planning in order to realize conceptually ambitious projects, many of which have taken her to some of the most remote regions of the planet. For her work, she has traveled to the Arctic Circle, Antarctica, Svalbard, New Zealand and all along the US/Mexican border.
Russell’s projects are contingent on a physical engagement with her research – she will literally go to the ends of the earth to make her work. An example would be her ongoing series Metaphorical Antipodes, which involves fabricating a landscape in her Indianapolis studio then documenting that fabrication against the actual landscape out in the world. In this series, a miniature iceberg made from cast glass is photographed against the ocean surrounding Greenland, or a plastic globe is photographed partially buried in Antarctic snow. Her vision for this work requires a union – and a tension – between the made and the real, and travel is her tool to manifest it. “If there was any magic to what I do, the part that I really enjoy and that others respond to, it’s the sense of ‘Oh, you really did that thing…. you didn’t construct this in Photoshop, you didn’t dream this up, you did it.’”
In the summer of 2021, Jacinda was slated to travel to the Colorado Ice Core Facility for a project when the Delta variant stymied her plans. Out of COVID-19 compliance, the Denver-based facility supervisors suspended all visits, leaving Jacinda without the external resources her work has come to depend upon – a perfect example of the “outside obstructions” she is constantly negotiating. When I ask how she will move the project forward in light of this suspension, her responses are pragmatic: she can use photographs of the facility online, she can focus on the activity that would have come after her research visits, and she can develop the various new skills required by every new project. Frustrating though this may be, these blocks have the odd effect of clarifying exactly what it is that Jacinda’s practice demands of her. “I might have to make something via my imagination without having the resources to understand what it looks like, or knowing how its presented in real life first. And it’s not that that’s hard, but I think so much of what I do is based on the experience of being there, seeing that, doing that. If you take that experience away, it’s not my project anymore.”
I perk up at this last remark, as it outlines one of my most enduring questions: what is required for our work to feel like our own? For Jacinda, her practice requires “being there, seeing that, doing that,” and I admire the resolve in her answer. All serious creative work demands a self-awareness of this kind, and this very self-awareness creates conditions under which her ambitious projects are realized. In some ways, all the planning, scheduling, budgeting and negotiations required for each of her long-distance projects are an essential part of her creative process. With every email, line item, and request for time-off, a vision for the work becomes clearer – a type of sketch not made with pencil on paper, but by navigating the practical minutiae of travel. But underneath it all is a desire for something that can’t really be spoken out loud, because it has yet to be made and remains inexplicable. And in this I’m reminded sharply of Teresita Fernandez’s advice to young artists, when she says
Jacinda rests completely assured in her desires because she places a great deal of trust her process. Indeed, all the preparation and planning for her research trips creates a border of time and access around a place or a landscape, but also an unknown. She knows where she’s going and how long she will be there, but the exact details of what she will make – composition, issues of scale, etc. – are decisions made only in the moment. But she is confident that once inside this border, the work will be made – rest completely assured. I can relate to this; I’ve long seen my own studio – the space of my materials, my notes and my projects – as a physical zone of potential that I move into and out of, and from which my own work emerges. Much of the time, if I just spend enough time there, sooner or later something starts to happen. The difference is that in order to get into my zone, I ride my bike across town. Jacinda, on the other hand, will travel above the Arctic circle. This is the “magic” that Jacinda’s practice enacts, and what makes the work her own: the lengths that she will travel
for a closer look.
In May of 2022, following the now-familiar months of planning and preparation, Jacinda landed in Greenland for a research trip by ship through Svalbard, one of northernmost populated regions on the planet. Shortly after boarding the boat, she tested positive for COVID. She spent the next 7 days, her entire Svalbard trip, in isolation below deck inside her room with glacial views passing outside her cabin window. Mercifully, Jacinda’s case of COVID was mild, but she only tested negative several hours before she was scheduled to board her return flight to the United States. Personally speaking, I would struggle to think straight between the frustration and disappointment of such a scenario, and to be sure, the artist was “so angry that first day.” But at a certain point during her arctic quarantine, she had the wherewithal set up her tripod and begin taking photographs, shifting the depth of field to focus not on the landscape, but onto the salt and water droplets of the window of her room.
Above Right: Jacinda Russell - View through the Salt Splattered Window While in Covid Quarantine, May 30, 2022
Although these most recent photographs frame a kind of loss – of time, of energy spent, of resources and plans – I must admit, I find myself oddly elated by them. This is because they capture, with incredible economy, a ghost on film: that moment when one breaks through block to make work. Despite very real obstructions and barriers, and through the failure of plans and time lost, one still makes something beautiful anyway. The very existence of these photographs performs and makes visible a capacity for revision, reimagination, and movement through challenge. They mourn, but they also endure.
*from the 2020 DeHaan Artist of Distinction video
*From a commencement speech delivered to the 2013 graduating class of Virginia Commonwealth University School of the Arts, titled On Amnesia, Broken Pottery, and the Inside of a Form