Jeanette Johns

Change Ringing
01.12–02.11.2023
Room 2

Change Ringing, an exhibition by Jeanette Johns, is grounded in observation. Like all of her work, this most recent project requires sustained attention and systematically solicits our gaze. As Milly-Alexandra Dery writes, her work is calibrated to the limits of our senses and our own experiences of reality ¹. Johns turns to empirical, even methodical disciplines to make the sciences, such as mathematics, manifest. Moreover, the inner workings of her practice, with their mechanically precise movements, encourage us to recognize the principles of logic behind traditional crafts.

Johns’ mother and grandmother were skilled weavers, and Johns has enjoyed the benefit of working on the family loom, which was shipped from Winnipeg to her temporary studio at the Fonderie Darling. Teaching herself, and mastering, the ambitious, laborious, and meticulous process of setting up a loom, Johns has managed to achieve an unexpectedly extensive project. Hers is a genealogy of weaving, an inherited learning process, an unconscious skill. Her hands are the gears behind the mechanical production of this body of work. Similarly, the physical labour represented in the calculated and repetitive movements on the loom is transposed to her printmaking practice. The equation of permutations is the same: the addition, subtraction, and multiplication of countless dyed cotton threads or lines of ink into two-dimensional fibre surfaces. Ipso facto, the works take on the execution of their making. Precise formulas for manipulating graphic patterns, simulating reliefs, creating various optical moiré effects and sequences of visual vibrations influence our perception of each piece.

In the gallery, their solemn arrangement evokes the interior of a chapel. The textile pieces are positioned on the wall symmetrically to their silkscreen print replicas. In form and format, they act as windows onto endless lines in motion. A plinth in the centre of the room displays a bronze cast bell. Viewers who enter CLARK’s temporary sanctuary are invited to ring the bell, and thus evoke the various uses—and change indicators—of this utilitarian, cross-cultural object. This piece alludes to the practice of change ringing, dating back to the 1600s in England, which involves ringing a set of bells in a controlled manner to produce variations in their striking sequences. The process creates bell sounds that don’t follow a conventional melody, but rather an alignment of mathematical combinations—a system that echoes the rigorous procedures behind Jeanette Johns’s work.

- Jean-Michel Quirion (translated by Jo-Anne Balcaen)

1 Dery, Milly-Alexandra. (2021). Exhibition text for Of things as they happen to be, presented at the Fonderie Darling.