Visions of a Whispered Past - Jakob Rowlinson

Saturday, August 28, 2021 - Sunday, October 10, 2021

Jakob Rowlinson is both artist and world-builder. Warping and weaving histories, his work constitutes a body that is constantly shifting. Symbols combine and align, giving a contemporary voice to historical imagery rendered in reams of rich felt; fleshy pink tones set within a palette of bucolic greens, cut through (or perhaps constrained) by framing devices in cord and leather.

His work becomes a queerness - an ongoing reinterpretation and subversion of a visual language that we are all aware of in different ways. Milky highlights on knuckles are counterposed with dark nail beds - bleeding, curling, or clawing their way out of the frame - reaching out at the viewer, or touching other flesh (like the penetrating finger of St. Thomas into the wound of Christ.) For Jakob, these hands speak to a coding that has been transferred between generations. “When I see a video recording of myself I become very aware of the hand gestures I am making, and how the campness of my limp wrists, or the curl of a particularly expressive gesture, makes me part of a larger archive of learned gestures and expressions that have been passed down through generations of LGBTQIA+ people.”

All this is set against the backdrop of the natural world, either alluded to in moss-green backdrops - with the felt conjuring an organic texture - or invoked through atlas moths and ferns, thorns and hooded kestrels. The kestrels are historically a symbol of status, but again Jakob’s investigative practice finds double meanings. “I want to reclaim the cultural landscape of ‘nature’ away from its implied heteronormative focus (and mythologising language such as “mother” nature), and to included representations which avoid the nature v.s. nurture, straight v.s. gay, dichotomy.”

This interest in ecology not only chimes with contemporary climate discourse, but echoes concerns shared by a long lineage of queer artists - from the medieval mystic visions of Hildegard of Bingen, through to those of Derek Jarman. In Sneaky Peak, cruising eyes peer out in bright blue from amidst green foliage and shady, mottled ferns - darkly unfurling in bubble wrap coated in black tar.

Jakob refers to Biological Exuberance, a seminal text in which Bruce Baghemill outlines over 400 species of animals that engage in same-sex behaviour. “Our understanding of the natural world is perceived through the lens of heteronormativity, and the public consciousness imagines animals, plants, landscapes and the animal kingdom as being fundamentally straight, and that queerness is something ‘man-made’”. Much as the landscapes of his work so often meld codes and signifiers - natural habitats and bodies simultaneously caged and transgressing - the soft textile of his work is often taken elsewhere by structural framing elements

This flexibility of reference and interpretation is in many ways the cornerstone of Jakob’s practice - taking a language and bending - or literally ‘queering’ - its meaning. Reflecting on his work, which resonates not only in the studio but across the internet, he notes the way in which marginalia often blended “different genders, bizarre animals, and playing with sexual references in an incredibly fluid manner […] in many ways, marginalia therefore operate like memes.” From the psalters of the past through to the annals of Instagram, Jakob’s work is a pilgrimage leading us from the catacombs to the cruising ground - towards a contemporary queer body that is endlessly shape-shifting and decoding itself.

--- Will Ballantyne-Reid

Jakob Rowlinson (b.1990, Norwich UK) received an MA in Sculpture from the RCA in 2017, and completed a BFA from the Ruskin school of Art in 2013.

Past solo exhibitions include: 'MADE IN SWEDEN' (2019) at the Tändsticksmuseet, Sweden; and 'Dissecting the Archive' (2017) at Clearview, London.