TALK: THE TOWER, Jesse Jones, Olwen Fouéré, TARA LONDI

AUGUST 2022

‘The Tower’ by Jesse Jones as part of The Magdalene Series at Rua Red

‘The Tower’, is a new work by artist Jesse Jones, and the third exhibition in the Magdalene Series at Rua Red, curated by Maolíosa Boyle.

Jesse Jones’ new film installation is the second part in a trilogy beginning with ‘Tremble Tremble’, which was commissioned for the Irish Pavilion at the 57th Venice Biennale in 2017.

Working with Rua Red dancers in residence Junk Ensemble, and a cast that includes actors Olwen Fouéré, Naomi Moonveld-Nkosi and a young choir of performers, ‘The Tower’ turns to the figure of the mystic and the heretic and questions ‘Who came before the witches?

The Magdalene Series features the work of five of Ireland’s leading artists Amanda Coogan, Jesse Jones, Grace Dyas, Alice Maher, and Rachel Fallon. The artists were commissioned by Rua Red in 2018 to create work in response to the conflicted and mysterious figure of Mary Magdalene. Over the last three years, the artists have been informed by a series of lectures by researchers, feminist theologians, and art historians on the history and legacy of the Magdalene, her association with the incarceration and institutionalisation of women, and the influence of religious, political and societal doctrine on her character.

Based on the writings of medieval female Christian mystics, ‘The Tower’ explores the women who were burned as heretics even before the first witch trials in the 17th century. It looks to a moment of radical potential, delving into the lost knowledge of women’s devotional and ecstatic visions and evoking the incarcerated penitent at prayer and at work.

"Jesse Jones takes us to the time that anticipated the witches' inquisition and invites us into the Tower. Here she summons the stories and visions of women that are both saints and witches and whose imagination held power to 'world new worlds' before it was crushed by the heresy trials that swept Europe in the 12th century.

Through the figure of Mary Magdalene, the music of 11th-century abbess and polymath composer Hildegarde af Bingen, and the inspired writings of medieval mystic Marguerite Porete, Jesse Jones unleashes the experience and injury of women's incarceration across Ireland, the UK, and France.

With ‘The Tower’ Jesse Jones doesn't merely correct history but makes space for spaciousness: for future, intangible or alternative worlds that are not limited by patriarch, eurocentric, and even human exceptionalism. In the immersive installation, we travel instead through Mary Magdalen's embrace of the sacred and the sensual; inside the mythic quantum energy of the natural world animating Hildegarde af Bingen's music, and around, the unfamiliar landscapes of divine love (agape) for which Marguerite Porete was sentenced to death in 1310." (Tara Londi, Art critic and writer.