From the weathered front door of Joan Jonas' summer home on a hillside on Cape Breton Island at the tip of Nova Scotia, the views never end. Just beyond the lush treetops, the Gulf of St. Lawrence sways in a gradient blue with a cobalt horizon where sea and sky meet.
For decades, this landscape has served as a summer backdrop for the rugged beauty, anonymity, and mild weather of New York City artists including Richard Serra, Philip Glass, Robert Frank, and June Leaf.
For Jonas, who arrived with his friends in the 70s, it was a canvas.
“I performed there,” she said of the scenery in a recent interview. Her voice was harsh and blunt, but not unfriendly. “She inspired me,” she said. What can I say?”
Many honorifics have been given to Jonas to encapsulate his pioneering legacy and elusive spirit: trailblazer, mystic, faithful, pioneer of ecological feminism, canonical video and performance artist. “Good Night Good Morning,” a new exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, explores these genres in a sweeping retrospective of the 87-year-old artist’s multimedia career and includes still images from “Nova Scotia Beach Dance” (1971). , one of Jonas' first performances in Cape Breton, and was reportedly viewed by the audience from a vantage point on the cliffs.
She also drew on island imagery and local lore. Her installation “They Come to Us Without Words,” installed at the 2015 Venice Biennale, features thin projections of Jonas, animals, and bees, along with ghost stories narrated according to Cape Breton oral tradition.
Jonas' nephew, London-based photographer Toby Coulson, heard the story about Cape Breton. Jonas's half-brother, Coulson, 39, a budding artist who grew up in England, loved visiting his aunt's loft in Manhattan's Soho. There, relics from the Canadian wilderness filled the walls and crevices. He took a portrait of Jonas when her Jonas exhibition opened at Tate Modern in 2018, but he couldn't shake the urge to capture her in a photo of Jonas against the seascapes he saw in her work. So he set out to capture what he could: Jonas' vitality and playfulness. The home as her studio and the wild beauty that surrounds it.
Plans for a summer visit were discussed, but things were delayed due to COVID-19. Finally, in July 2022, Coulson took a ten-day trip to Cape Breton with his partner, Clarisse d'Arcimoles, and their two young children.
They took a seven-hour flight from London to Halifax, then drove four hours northeast and finally took the winding dirt road to Jonas' home on the coast.
“It felt like newly discovered land,” he said. The sounds and silence of nature overtook him.
Coulson recalled that the two-story home was unstable and the hot water leaked quickly. He decorated the interior with Celtic ornaments, reflecting the island's Celtic roots. Glittering kelp, grooved shells, and smooth stones were scattered everywhere.
“She is an artist. In ~ “It’s her work.” Coulson said. “Everything, the way she dresses, even her knives and forks and plates.”
Most of the decorations were found at “Myles from Nowhere,” a local antique store with no heat, lights or water.
“I go home when it gets dark.” said owner Myles Kehoe in a phone interview.
The store, where cell phone use is prohibited, is full of vintage products. He and Jonas have been friends for over 30 years and share a love of simple, handmade items.
“I had the ugliest airplane I’d ever seen in my life, and I knew who would like it,” Kehoe said with a laugh.
“I kind of know what he wants.” He continued: “So when I find something, I just put it aside and wait until next year. And she usually takes it all.”
That was the case with a collection of miniature wooden houses that Kehoe found at a yard sale. Some had cellophane windows to look like stained glass. All made from salvaged materials.
“She turned them over,” Kehoe said.
A small tower, one of the wooden structures, is on display in the MoMA exhibition hall.
“He collects very unusual things,” Jonas said. “And I often look for props and objects. It could all be for my work or just for display. I make no distinction.”
In addition to handcrafted objects, maritime themes and an obsession with the wind appear as central motifs in Jonas' work. These include “Waltz” (2003), a series of totemic rituals using masks and mirrors on the coast near a Nova Scotia forest. “Moving Off the Land” (2018), a meditation on the ocean and its fragile, life-giving ecosystem.
Coulson began to capture the deep-rooted influence of the island in his work. Most days, Jonas, Coulson and his family would go to the beach, where they would cook in a rustic kitchen with frying pans hanging on steel nails, and in the evenings, mosquitoes and horseflies would hide behind the screened porch.
“There’s blue, green and sky, so it’s kind of liberating,” Coulson said. “You can see where her work comes from and what her inspiration is.”
Jonas didn't put it that way. “There are always overlaps and influences, but you can’t really say what they are,” she said. “It’s mysterious.”
Meanwhile, Coulson observed with a camera. Jonas, barely 5 feet tall, is walking in slow motion on hot sand. collecting stones; Lying in shallow water. Swimming — Nowadays it's only breaststroke and it's easier to move around.
He said, “I worked every day until the moment I asked to take a picture.”
For decades, Jonas, a skilled swimmer, went down the cliff twice a day. It's harder to negotiate steep bluffs now, she said. She drives her car down when the water isn't too rough.
“I would go every day if I could.” she said “I used to take a shower on the beach.”
Jonas first went up to Cape Breton with friends in the early 1970s to visit the nearby farm of Fluxus artist Geoffrey Hendricks.
“It was so beautiful and magical,” she said. “And I liked the other people there, so that was an added asset.”
She purchased land for a hilltop overlooking the sea in 1975 and worked with a local builder to build a wooden house. Initially, the house had no interior walls and only had kerosene lamps. A summer resident, she lived without electricity or plumbing for her first five years.
“I lived there when it was a bare shell,” she said. “We slowly made it a comfortable place.”
Built like a local farmhouse with shingles, the building originally measured 20 by 24 feet. Then came the long, wooden porch. And in the early '90s, a 20-by-12-foot studio was added, flooding the space with natural light.
The island has long attracted writers, performance artists, photographers, composers who create works of art, and avant-garde types who dance in the town square in the evenings or invite each other for dinner, but this is not the case. Jonas was quick to realize that it was a community of artists. Geography alone expands the definition of neighbors (it's common for friends to live about 20 miles away). Most people fill their days with productive work in solitude.
Photography and installation artist Jeri Coppola first came to Cape Breton in the early '90s as an archivist and house sitter for Lynn Davis, Rudy Wurlitzer, Helen Tworkov and Philip Glass. She became friends with Jonas a few years later.
“It’s not a tourist destination,” Coppola said. “There’s nothing else to do but work.”
In summer, the sun sets at 9 PM, making the days bright and colorful.
Coppola (no relation to the filmmaker) recalled a day spent at Jonas' house after Hendricks and artist Sur Rodney (Sur). Jonas began filming the two men wandering through the woods behind the house, which Coppola called the “Fairy Forest.” It translated into a natural performance by Geoff and Sur reacting to the scenery.
“You can work in a broader way than you can in New York,” Jonas said. “It’s a little bit empty, a little bit empty. i like it.”
Coulson's photos captured the ordinary and the magnificent. Blurry coastal scenes, the artist's scattered materials; a portrait of Jonas and her curled poodle Oz; The golden hour tones and delightful mirrors express Jonas's own fascination with reflections.
“It felt like photography in its purest form,” Coulson said. “We only took a few pictures each day.”
One of his photographs on display at MoMA shows Jonas towering over a miniature village. Her stature is colossal, and her presence is sublime.