Jennie Bates: Back to School

Jennie has long been interested in the theatre of learning – how display can make knowledge appear stable even when it’s anything but. She makes dioramas: miniature, box-framed tableaux that collage found imagery, often from vintage encyclopaedias, with her own drawings and paintings. These works treat the frame like a stage, inviting viewers to peer into fictional worlds that mimic the authority of museum displays. In her most recent, a school of hand-painted and paper-collaged fish swim over a sheet of graph paper – a nod to the classroom settings in which dioramas have traditionally been used. Numbered one to six and grouped in twos, the fish appear to belong to specific species, yet without an explanatory key it is impossible to tell whether these species are real, imagined, or on what basis they have been categorised. The work’s title, tu y yo nunca, offers no clues; like many of Jennie’s titles, it is in Spanish, and not necessarily accessible to an English-speaking audience. By echoing the exclusivity of academic language – while sidestepping its authority by being Spanish rather than Latin – it quietly reminds us that language can exclude as readily as it explains.

Within the framework of the fellowship, Jennie has broadened her study of the institution to include vitrines, charts and diagrams. Two colourful silkscreens on graph paper – Et Cetera and Ni una ni la otra – depict hands and stairs, framed like information charts, with blue-painted wood clasping the paper at the top and bottom. They resemble diagrams from an instruction manual, the graph paper reinforcing a sense of learning and objective truth. Yet, as in tu y yo nunca, without the corresponding text we have no idea what they mean. In Case Study, a mesh cover replaces the usual glass on a handmade museum-style vitrine. This flimsy protection softens the display method’s usual didacticism, exposing the glass for what it is: both a barrier and a signifier of value. The translucency of the material allows the viewer to look into, or through the work, yet remain aware of the mediation. 

The barrier that both reveals and conceals is becoming increasingly central to Jennie’s work, informed by Scottish psychiatrist R.D. Laing’s theory of the ‘divided self’ (R.D. Laing, The Divided Self: An Existential Study in Sanity and Madness, Tavistock Publications, London, 1960). Laing proposed that each of us navigates a split between the ‘true self’ – spontaneous, alive, authentic – and the ‘false self’, the socially adapted persona we present to others. When the true self feels unsafe, we retreat into performance or fantasy.

A work that exemplifies this is Brane Multiverse, a series of five mesh panels layered in front of one another like lenses in a kaleidoscope. Each panel is covered with Jennie’s drawings: some, such as the sketch of a folding partition, resemble studies for sculptures she has made or plans to make; others reflect her fascination with misinterpretation – a closed box, a button that says push but backwards, the word blue written in five languages. They hang suspended in space, the nearer screens sharply legible, the ones behind blurred through layers of mesh. It is a metaphor for Laing’s idea that authentic connection is obstructed by the roles we play and the systems we inhabit. The screens suggest layers of mediation – technology, social expectation, language itself – that come between people.

The fellowship has given Jennie the space and resources to expand this thinking, not just conceptually but physically. Her next project will scale works like Brane Multiverse up, transforming them into immersive environments. She is developing a new installation, A Tower in the Sky, composed of wall-height, semi-transparent dividers that viewers must walk through to experience the work. In the middle of this, on its own freestanding wall, she plans to recreate the fallen horse and rider from Italian Gothic painter Simone Martini’s Blessed Agostino Novello Triptych (c.1324–28) – an image she reads as the epitome of failed communication: a messenger unseated from their mount, the message they carry unlikely ever to reach its recipient. 

Though painted long before Birmingham School of Art was built, Martini’s triptych would likely have been admired when the school opened its doors in 1885, amid the Gothic Revival and renewed fascination with religious imagery. Jennie has said that she deliberately uses out of date or disproven material as a source for her collages, as a way of opening herself up to relationships she wouldn’t make otherwise. Yet the messages in her work feel anything but out of date. The words that spring to mind – connection, match, boundaries – are the vocabulary of online dating, communication workshops and, improbably, sex parties. There’s a curious contemporaneity to her practice that feels both at home with, and slightly at odds with, the Victorian surrounds she’s working within; perhaps because she is embedded in a living art school, among students who are grappling with many of the same questions about communication, self-presentation and what it means to make work in a mediated world. 

After the fellowship ends in February, Jennie is considering new settings in which to develop these ideas: libraries, archives or other places where knowledge is stored and preserved. One could imagine her using actual museum display cases rather than the ones she constructs herself, or situating her works among existing artefacts, to test the boundaries between what is real and what is not, and how much display determines what we believe to be true. One hopes that wherever her work finds itself, a human contingent remains at its core. For all her engagement with the past, it is the present – our ways of seeing, relating and communicating now – that Jennie’s practice ultimately addresses.