55. BENJAMIN JONES - A SPACE BETWEEN TOUCH AND TIME.

Benjamin Jones, Binder #39, Binder #40, both 2023. Courtesy the Artist and Loom Gallery, Milan.

The first piece of work I ever saw of yours was a large print of a map made on carbon paper, where each place name had been crossed out - leaving a document of erasure -

It feels a long time ago now, but certainly still has echos in the current work. At the time I was thinking about how meticulous the process of mapping landscape is, compartmentalising and revealing through language and visual data. I was looking particularly at the UK National Parks which have this aura of being more natural / untouched / wild spaces, though of course are heavily human-altered landscapes. It is also a process that compresses history into a single plane of information.

I took maps of the Parks and crossed out every place name. Erasure provided a way to work against a sense of knowing a place via this overlay of information. To have this data is a comfort, promising predictability when navigating; the land has been charted, there are no unknowns. So this erasure is asking how our sense of place is shaped by information, how we project it onto reality, how this sense of knowing a place through it perhaps allows us to ‘confuse the map with the territory’, to believe that the totality of a place can be known in abstraction.

There’s also a reference to the past and future of these landscapes; in that they suggest a time before language had compartmentalised space into places, but also a future point where this language is somehow unreadable to whoever may be viewing it. This aspect of being able to simultaneously read multiple time scales or points of reference in a piece is something that I’ve remained interested in, and that carries through much of my work since these maps.

Benjamin Jones, Untitled (National Parks), 2016. Courtesy the Artist. Image: John Taylor.

There is a reoccurring sense of physical space within your works, of land masses and of tangible surfaces that seem either to be very close or very far away - do you feel this and if so why is this?

There are varying scales of time present across the works, most often signified through natural subjects or the traces of darkroom processes. A work such a View Towards the Pacific 2019-22 deals with the geological timescale of erosion; the poppies published in issue #3 M-A (A SPACE BETWEEN) in contrast are far more ephemeral. As viewers, the span of our own lives are in a kind of dialogue with these various rhythms and cycles in the natural world.

Benjamin Jones, Morning, Afternoon #2, 2023. Courtesy the Artist and Loom Gallery, Milan.

The work Morning, Afternoon, a photograph of the sky with two suns published in issue #3, provides another example. A group of these works, printed on dibond panels, were installed throughout the village of Pieve Tesino, in Trentino, Italy, during summer 2023. They were made in response to the story of the village's shepherds who in the 1600’s left shepherding behind to become print sellers for a local print-works. They travelled the mountains on foot, going as far as Moscow and South America, away for great stretches of time. Their wives and children remained at home in the village; the two suns became a way to relate to that experience of separation via the measuring of the passage of days, tracked by the suns progress across the sky. Of course at this time, communication across such distances was nigh-on impossible for the average person. So these works use landscape to relate historical experience to the present. They were installed floating slightly off rough stone walls in passages, stairways and alleys, to generate chance encounters when navigating the village.

Installation view of To Live Inside a Second, Pieve Tesino, 2023. Produced for Una Boccata d'Arte 2023: a project by Fondazione Elpis in collaboration with Galleria Continua and the participation of Threes.

When I think of your works published in issue 1 and 3 of M-A (A SPACE BETWEEN), I think of first impressions and then as the eye settles into the image, the picture seems to change, emerging into something else, is there a process you tend to follow in the production of your works?

I’ve always been interested in how process and materiality develop meaning. Whether this is Giuseppe Penone cutting back the layers of a trees growth or Liz Deschenes photograms that integrate a viewers reflection and position into the work. It’s for this reason that I primarily use analogue processes; materials that are sensitive to light, touch, time, chemistry, exposure. Photography enables the image to be effected by and in dialogue with these aspects. Experimentation with process, exploring that particular language, is a constant in my practice. One that has resulted in various abstract groups of work made in cycles.

I also make ‘straight’ photographs, that are sometimes printed immediately, sometimes wait in the archive for a few years, and often are re-printed with different exposures, scale and paper type at different times; so a long term relationship with these relatively few selected images. What is significant for me is their poetic capacity for meaning, for engaging with the viewers interpretations, emotions and speculations, eschewing reliance on fact and narrative in favour of emotive weight. It’s due to that constant sense of more to be discovered that I return to poets such as Philip Larkin, Wallace Stevens and Leontia Flynn for example.

Thinking back to the works published in issue #1, a number were from a group titled Binder. These are collages I've been making since around 2019, with a new cycle of 7 completed last year. They are created by projecting multiple negatives onto sheets of light sensitive paper in the darkroom, masking different areas during each exposure to print each image into different areas, sometimes overlapping (and going black), sometimes remaining blank. They fragment the botanical source images and weave them together, pushing back at recognisability, setting these organic forms within a geometric framework. There is a lot of chance involved, the process layered enough that I can't exactly prefigure the outcome. This is one process of many, and a large part of what I do is experimentation with the materials to develop such approaches that define a group of works. Another example would be the group Fog, made with light, chemistry and light sensitive paper. Whilst Binder fragments and collages photographs, Fog appears somewhere between appearance and disappearance, with no discernible ‘image’. The title refers to the 'fogging' of paper; an accidental exposure to light. Defining the parameters before introducing chance is centrally important; the opposite is true in printing the straight photographs however, which require a lot of precision.

Across all these groups, I’m interested in what the experience of that final photographic object is. There are therefore commonalities, with most works made using a specific heavy weight, matte silver gelatin paper, displayed without being mounted to a substrate and so retaining a more sculptural form. Their frames are specifically designed to emphasise this object-hood, the sense of the print as a unique object that through material and scale has it's own history and presence. Bound to it's referent but independent, not a ‘window’. With emphasis on how it establishes distance from it and generates potential for new meaning, that as you recognised, has the capacity to change with time but also with the viewer.

Benjamin Jones, Poppy, Provence (4.1), 2023. Courtesy the Artist and Loom Gallery, Milan. M-A (A SPACE BETWEEN) issue 3, 2024.

Your meadow series have such a sense of calm, they are fragile and strong, fleeting and yet have a permanence - and needed to sit as a set to conclude the new issue of M-A. Please can you expand as to the process of how this series came into being and what they mean to you?

That fragility you picked up on is really at the core of it. When photographing something so small so close up, the physics of the lens dictate an incredibly shallow focus, itself something slight, delicate. These pictures are a kind of balancing act, a fragile slither of clarity prescribed by the proximity of camera to subject. I’ve never been so interested in making photographs that propose a neutrality or objectivity. The subjectivity of photography, its apparatus and materials, and the way it re-presents the world to distill or suggest something other, is what I’m interested to explore. So making these pictures became about this act of looking closer, taking a perspective less defined by our own bodies; so being on the ground, focused at this close distance, and making monochromatic images of these multicoloured scenes.

The whole series was made within a ø10m circle in an olive grove in Provence, where I was on a residency last year as part of the Galerie Heimet/NG Art Creative Prize. Traditionally the ground between trees is cleared to minimise competition for nutrients. In this case it hadn’t been, with great botanical biodiversity the result; that also provided a habitat and food source for numerous insects. I became interested in this overlapping, tangled world hidden nearest the ground, like looking at the weave that comprises the wider landscape. A less ordered space, more chaotic and opposed to agriculturally organised space. They are structured photographs, heavily composed and pictorial, something that emphasises their constructed nature as a trace of their subject. Their relationship between ephemerality and permanence then, is centred on the fact of these plants brief existence and the way their appearance punctuates the seasonal cycle; participating in processes of pollination etc, that are part of a slower, deeper natural rhythm.

You have a particular relationship with Italy which seems to be evolving, can you expand upon this connection and what you have learned since being based there?

Since 2020 I’ve been working with Loom Gallery in Milan, and so have produced a number of projects with them including a solo show in the gallery last year; previously a collaboration with Antonini Milano and group presentation in Ljubljana. The conversations around the work have been brilliant, and so of course you meet people, the work is seen, new collaborations are instigated; there’s a fantastic energy there. The most significant of these was an invitation last year to participate in Una Boccata d’Arte, a nationwide project initiated by Fondazione Elpis and Galleria Continua, that included a residency and public commission in the village of Pieve Tesino, Trentino. It bore the Morning, Afternoon works I mentioned earlier, and a large piece (To Live Inside a Second) that will become a permanent installation. The whole project was developed in response to local histories and installed throughout the village during summer 2023. So indeed the relationship is evolving, with opportunities to expand the scope of my practice through these sorts of collaborations.

What has been learned specifically is somehow difficult to pin down; of course it’s bound up in personal and working relationships, exposure to different histories and places. It's really a sedimentation of all the conversations, interpretations and opportunities to develop the work. It is also however the increased awareness of Italian art, design, landscape and architectural history; experienced in a way that research from afar does not permit, understanding the shape this history gives to the present, and how it underscores a sensibility.

Since the pandemic years life has changed near unrecognisably, and so it's hard to separate everything out. The experience has regardless been formative, and I now travel there multiple times a year. It’s become a hugely important place, now populated with great friends and collaborators. The opportunity to work intensively in any country other than your own I think gives a stronger sense of the changing world, of commonalities and localised challenges, and a new perspective on what defines the culture you originate from.

All works courtesy the Artist and Loom Gallery, Milan.

All images copyright Benjamin Jones.

Benjamin Jones is a contributing artist to issue 1 and issue 3 of M-A (A SPACE BETWEEN).