Interview with… interdisciplinary artist and researcher Roisin Jones
Roisin Jones (b. London,UK) is a British Caribbean interdisciplinary artist and researcher whose practice spans from photography, sculpture, performance and poetry. Jones’ work delves into the complexity of identity and the journey of self-discovery within liminal spaces. By exploring Caribbean folklore and culture, she crafts narratives that spark discussions about the diaspora, engaging the audience to foster a sense of connection. Her practice weaves stories and memories into imagined realms, celebrating the richness of her Caribbean heritage and the diverse community that exists in the in-between. In mourning the loss of these communities’ histories, strength is drawn from it, constructing a multifaceted identity that embraces ambiguity and finds comfort within it.
Segolene Py
Please present yourself in a few words.
Roisin Jones
My name is Roisin Jones. I am an artist and researcher from London and my work specialises in the intercise between the disciplines of performance, sculpture, poetry, photography and moving image. I'm currently researching diasporic stories from the Caribbean and interested in archiving Caribbean stories and histories.
SP: How did you start practising, how did art enter your life?
RJ: I've always been an artistic person. I’ve been performing arts and writing poetry my whole life. I have been on my artistic journey recently and practising within the last four years.
I guess one moment for me would be when I was about 9yo. One of my poems got published in an anthology. I've been writing ever since really. I've always been doing something creative. I didn't have much friends at school, so me actually creating things, drawing and doing any form of art was my way of expressing myself. I never knew that I would make a career out of it but it's something that I've done organically throughout my whole life, as a way of coping with everyday life. I would say I've always been quite fantastical, a bit of a daydreamer. So, it was a way for me to interact with the world and understand what I was going through.
SP: Would you say your family supported you in this journey?
RJ: Yeah, big time. Actually, my mom named me thinking that she's going to have like an actress daughter, and that's why she got me into theatre school. That and also because I was quite shy, so it was a way for me to have a voice of my own and learn how to talk to people, which I'm still learning. So I would say yes, my family are very, very supportive and they are artistic too. This is something they've always engaged with.
SP: You started with poetry, and then you went to theatre school?
RJ: Yeah, thinking about it. If we're going to go real back I did ballet, violin, poetry, and then I did a combination of all three. I also did pottery. Then I got into theatre school from the age of nine, and I didn't stop until I was 18. I've only started coming back to my artistic practice in the recent years.
SP: That's interesting because I know that your practice is very installation based and interdisciplinary. So hearing that you were already doing all these things, and then decided to combine them from an early stage in your life, doing this now with your practice is very interesting: something that you were already doing quite young and followed you until today in your current practice of blending different practices.
RJ: When I saw my MA grad show at the RCA last year, I realised that my solo was not only the subject I chose to do research on, but also acted like an autobiography. I exhibited ceramics and pottery with the sculptures that I've made with clay, there was the photography and the performance in the videos. Yeah, I think this it's clearly my methodology before I even knew it was my methodology.
SP: What inspires your work?
RJ: A lot of it is folklore and fairy tales. I love the fantastical and the imagined, fairytales… So there is a lot of storytelling coming from the work. Also I like the idea of world building. I guess that's because of my nerdiness, I like gaming and anime. I like the idea of creating a law. There's a lot of the fantastical elements in that.
SP: It's also very linked to your Caribbean roots and heritage, with the folklore and all the stories you tell through your work. Would you say that you've always been in touch with your Caribbean side, but also with the fact of being British Caribbean you have to sort of look for it, even if your family might bring you this side of your culture.
RJ: It took me a long time to figure out that things that are normal my family are not really the British experience. I grew up in a predominantly white middle-class suburban area. Although I was somehow lucky that the way I've been brought up have always been connected to my history. There wasn't a lot of people that looked like me or my family at the time. I grew up in a mixed family, so I've always been exposed to multiculturalism. In terms of my Caribbean roots, it’s something that I've had to - especially now I am a young adult - really learn, learn more about my culture to be more at ease with myself. I was always ostracised for being the only black person in my school. I had to learn and unlearn things about myself to create a sense of pride in myself, even the way I talk and the things that I didn't realise that were part of my Caribbean heritage. A lot of my work is bridging that gap between the two identities that I find myself in and within and also sometimes in conflict with each other because they don't quite fit, and trying to come to terms with that.
Freedom (white), Print on Patinated Copper sheet, 2023
SP: Would you say your work has a specific style, and how would you describe it?
RJ: I would like to say I don't have a particular style, because I've worked across a lot of mediums. There's a relationship between all of the pieces and the objects that I work with. I'm very much interested in the speculative, the fictional and the mythical, the fairy tales… There is an storybook element to my work. I'm not only interested in just the realism but something a little deeper and imagined. I like people to see themselves within my work and have that relationship with themselves. I don't want to dictate that too much for the style. I still want it to be open so that people can read what they need to read within the work.
For photography it's more about bringing something special about the subject into it. There is a lot of love I have for my subjects when I'm thinking about photography, and it's the same with the objects that I make. There's a lot of love in them.
SP: When you created the bronze sculptures From the Depth and Mother of All, were you inspired by anyone in particular ?
RJ: Mother of All is a blend of a lot of black women that I know. I wanted her to look like she could be anybody. She could be your sister, your mother, your aunt... and then I worked from there.
She’s the mother of all these masks. It's less working about a person but it's more like an idea, an idea of the self. So it's piecing together our history and piecing together the identity, like I've had to over my life and my experiences to be able to come whole black person or black woman and being okay with that. She's realised through her fragmentation and piecing them together and then memorialising those pieces. She's not really meant to look like a person or be inspired by a person specifically because like I said, I love people to be able to see themselves and like I would like to see myself in these pieces.
Mother of All, Bronze, 2023
SP: Do you feel that you're still in the journey discovery? You said that it's about piecing together or bridging identities, do you feel like you still have a lot of work to do on this? I've been thinking recently of identity as something in state of flux. So I was just wondering if you think that's how it is or if there's an end or a goal to it.
RJ: I used to feel like there was a goal where I'd be fully comfortable with myself and that identity. Now, especially with the research that I'm doing and the more I make art, I realise I've become more comfortable with the ambiguity of identity, and the fact that you can be multiple selves and multiple realised parts of yourself and that's okay.
I come from a very multicultural family, so there's comfort in not fitting into one space and into one idea of myself. It means that I can relate to so many different people from different classes from different racial backgrounds and my idea now of who I am. Everyone's in the process of self-actualizing and finding out who they are. Practically speaking, I'm starting to feel more confident and appreciative of who I am as a person. I use my art to explore that. It's been nice to see the work evolving of all over the years, you can see the different versions of yourself that you're trying to come to terms with.
SP: Your art is a way of tracing the journey through understanding of your identity and maybe it evolved as you were learning. What changed, if it did yet, in your practice since you started?
RJ: I'm going a lot deeper now. It's hard when you're getting started, and I'm still getting started, to lose thinking about what you should be doing as an artist and the subject matters you should be treating, especially as black artist when you might feel like you should be talking about certain political things. Whereas my practice is becoming more specialised, because I'm coming more comfortable with the identity of being an artist. I can call myself an artist now and I can call myself a researcher. My work is evolving because I'm becoming more involved myself personally with this area, this profession, or vocation. Now I'm more looking at stories that are more specific to me, because the stories are interesting and have more meaning to me.
SP: You started with photography and then started to move towards the installation. What would you say drove you to try something else?
RJ: I'll never give up photography. It's always part of the process and every single part of the works just like poetry, it's kind of how I get into my subject matters. I felt like I wanted to explore different ways of telling the same story. There's something that can be said between the relationship between objects and the relationship between different visual forms. Now, I'm getting closer to the stories that I do want to tell. There's so much freedom when you're thinking about the subject matter and then finding tools that can tell the story better and they will come out differently.
SP: What’s your process when you create ? How do you create art?
RJ: It depends on the type of work. Sometimes it starts from my poetry. I'll have a one of those moments where you're sitting on the tube and then I need to get a pen and write something down, it can go from there and the imagery. Sometimes I see an image in my head and then I try and build on that. So that's a very organic process. Sometimes it starts with an idea on a specific thing. It never ends up how I initially think about it, but it kicks off a journey and then it might go to a different route and find myself in a different outcome.
It's also about the spaces you're going to show the work which I've noticed become quite important. To be specific, with my photography series Resilience: It started off as a response to a political event that had me journaling and meeting people and taking their picture. The story was told from that and you can see those images come together. For Temple of the Spider, which is an ongoing work, showing it at the RCA grad show then exhibited for another solo show at Meadow Gallery, under the title Ode to Temperance, also questions the space. It's the same objects, the same video, but it had a completely different story and it realised itself in a completely different way. That's something that's just happened naturally. Sometimes the work responds to something, and I don't know it until it's finished. That process has me questioning: what will be the next story with that work?
SP: So, presenting your work in different space offer a different story? How would you say Temple of the Spider was different to Ode to temperance?
RJ: It’s the people, I think you have very specific idea as an artist, and then you put it into that public space, and the people activate the work and their relationship to it. That's what changes those two special experiences. With Resilience, I had an entire body of work to exhibit, not knowing how people would respond to it. As the feedback came in, I started to hear about stories within my work that I hadn't realised was there.
With the grad show, and Ode to Temperance, having people and other artists activate the space was very beautiful, moving, but it also makes you realise how insular it can be at the moment of conception - the story and pieces I made and the research I'm doing. When you bring it to other people, you can see the real story. You sort of see the overarching story. In the case of Ode to Temperance, people are directly in relationship to the work, which is incredible because you can see a new story. Some people were thinking about the subject of femininity in my sculptures, others talked about loss, grief, community, communion, and intimacy and finding a sense of belonging. Suddenly, the works have a different relationship. They're in dialogue was the people and then they're in dialogue with each other.
SP: So there's a certain aim when you start doing it, and you do it for yourself, then for people as well, and to share the same experience.
RJ: With No Solid Ground specifically, when I wrote it, there was frustration maybe anger and I felt like it was very dark when you read the work on its own. However, it evolved into a video with Moussa and Dembis responded with the drums and the music to the visuals and the theme. So, it is something that started quite dark, and quite angry and aggressive to something that became uplifting. It also started more masculine in a way, becoming incredibly feminine. I remember one of my friend, Okiki, saying: “Thank you for showing me what black femininity could look like and how beautiful it could be”. You can bet that I didn't have that intention, but perhaps subconsciously, I was exploring something within myself. It's interesting to see how it resonated with others.
No Solid Ground (still), video, 2023
SP: Would you like to talk more about the Caribbean culture and spirituality within your work ?
RJ: My relationship between time involves reclaiming history and this spiritual element of talking about non linear time, that we are connected to our past. For me, creating these objects and creating these images, is really claiming something that has been lost to us and something that we've been taught to be demonised and taught to be not a proper way of being throughout history, is a nice way of putting it. A lot of my works, including No Solid Ground feature, elements and inspiration from Afro Caribbean cultures and Afro Caribbean spirituality.
The video touches on reclaiming ourselves and to self-actualise ourselves as a collective of people. Although everyone's experiences are different, across the diaspora, it's about returning to who you are, and returning towards our ancestors and that sacred knowledge that has been lost. It’s having conversation about that and accepting that as a part of your identity.
In No Solid Ground, I'm as this character of Anansi going back to the Divine and asking them to anoint me to allow me to tell these stories. So, in a way, that's like being baptized into that tradition, and I think it's important not to lose that tradition. You can see that as a spiritual connection, or political connection, a political point, one about morality as well. In my work, I'm very interested in finding methods to overcome—I don’t want to say oppression, but it's more than that. Overcome the things that tell you that you’re less than, that you are not worthy, that your stories don’t matter, your history and your culture don’t matter. It's finding ways to return to a sense of sacredness in yourself so that you can be the person that you are, that you've always been. It's really close to discovering the person that you've always been without the world telling you that you're meant to be a certain way. I think that is a spiritual journey in itself.
No Solid Ground (still), video, 2023
SP: Would you say that it's also in Mama Benin ?
RJ: To provide some context, Mama Benin is about imagining a conversation with these nations, these amazing incredible empires and kingdoms that had their own cultures before colonialism. If I could tell them what will happen to them, it's like a prophetic conversation about that. It's talking to that divinity. It's also a reminder - I think people forget that it's gonna sound crude - but we were not always slaves. There were these people that were princes and had kingdoms. There's a rich culture and there still is it but the work is reminding us of that: of what we're mourning what we're grieving, that isn't just a sense of suffering. We weren't just made to suffer. It wasn't just oppression, what we're mourning is a genocide of the many cultures that people came from. People are still mourning that, in this day and age. It's talking about the fact that we are not removed from that history. And because it's 2024 that history lives on in us, and it re-manifests, so we have to take a conscious effort to reprogram that, to challenge that.
When I look at those two videos, I see two different responses to the idea of self-actualization and connection. I'm actively engaging with it and showing that as a methodology for people who viewed my work.
Mama Benin (still), video, 2022
SP: Do you feel like you have a role in your community, if there's a community for you ? Do feel like have a role in it?
RJ: I would assume responsibility. I think a huge amount of responsibility with the art I'm making with what I'm trying to say, and who I'm trying to connect to. Ultimately, I'm always trying to connect with people through my art because I've never felt like I've belonged, or I'd have to really search to find my people in life. I'm always searching for a communityand find myself part of many overlapping ones. I'm hugely grateful that I am really close to my family because of that. It's a community that I'm a part of.
SP: Your practice and installation are sort of showing misconnections creating connections. There's kind of a community of people trying to figure out who they are, and where they belong.
RJ : Yeah, that's exactly that . Temple of the Spider was always about creating a space between spaces. It was always about co-opting that space for people in the diaspora, or people that are in-between, spaces in between realities. It’s a commentary on time as well. It's very much for the people that don't really belong. It is finding that community for people that don't belong, and not seeing myself reflected in the world around me, I am creating my own. This is the continued research that I'm doing; our history as something that has been lost and that's an in between, and how to bridge that gap and retrieve that as well. It's about really being comfortable with chaos, with ambiguity, with being dislocated, and at the same time, not belonging and belonging, and living within those multiple states of being. A word I could use is interstitial, the intercise, place between places. I'm very interested in that place, where people fall through the cracks, that's my community. As the work progresses, and as I grow as an artist, that's a community I can grow with, with other artists and other people that are connected to the work to find a sense of belonging. I always thought that my sense of who I was was a destination. Now I realise it's not, it's a collection of experiences. It’s this feeling comfortable with that, that sense of self being. It's a journey.
SP: Quite a difficult journey but how inspiring ! To close the interview I’d like to know what’s next for you? Any projects in line you can tell us about?
RJ: This year I really want to focus on creating work from the last research trip I took from Jamaica. I think it's going to be recontextualizing some of the stuff I've already done at home. This trip was hugely influential on how I see myself. I'm looking forward to really divie into that and making a lot more work, thinking about news stories. My work has been personal but definitely not intentionally. It's been a subconscious personal thing. This time, I'm consciously putting myself within the subject matter rather than being the subject matter, or being the performer.
SP: Was it the first time that you went to the Caribbean country or to Jamaica for research purposes?
RJ: This was my first research abroad. It was quite a big deal. It made me realise and think about what home is. I think that's definitely the subject matter of my new research. It introduced to me a new way of making which I'm quite excited about. It introduced me to a different way thinking about myself as an artist, as a person and a human being. I definitely think that's going to be part of my methodology. Integrating what I learnt from that trip will change the type of art that I want to make, how I want to make it, and who I'm making it for.
Contact
Roisin Jones
@iam_roisin
www.iamroisin.com