Jess Riva Cooper is obsessed with fungus. The 33-year-old Toronto ceramic artist, a self-described “science-fiction nerd,” imbues her work with themes of human life overgrown with parasitic plant matter.
Cooper’s Viral Series, a sequence of ceramic sculptures currently on exhibit at the Gardiner Museum as an entry in the fourth annual RBC Emerging Artist People’s Award, consists of glazed, Victorian-era female busts sprouting three-dimensional plant and fungal matter from their orifices and scalps. The effect is at once eerie and beautiful, repulsive yet compelling.
“I’m looking at the idea of parasitic plant life, or fungal spores, taking over,” Cooper explained in a phone interview. “Of nature taking over our human-made world, taking it back from the acts of destruction we’ve wrought upon it.”
Cooper, who’s competing with four other artists for the $10,000 prize – the winner will be determined by public voting and announced Oct. 14 – also gets inspiration from very real environmental phenomena that she said are spookier than any fiction.
She’s fascinated by kudzu vines, which are native to southern China and Japan and were brought to the United States in the 1950s as an erosion control method. The vines have no natural predators and can grow at astonishing rates. With climate change creating higher temperatures, Cooper said, this invasive species is beginning to creep farther and farther north, with damaging environmental consequences.
“It’s this perfect example of this ludicrous, myopic view of ‘this will work perfectly,’ without any thought to how this new species of plant would act on the environment,” Cooper said.
And “I like that idea of nature bringing chaos to ordered spaces, or reclaiming space by creeping over our world.”
Growing up, Cooper was a member of Holy Blossom Temple, and she recently moved back to Toronto from the United States, where she did a master’s in ceramics at the Rhode Island School of Design and taught ceramics at schools in Oregon and Chicago.
Though she left Jewish day school after Grade 4, the Yiddish folklore she was read as a child – particularly the story of the dybbuk, a malicious spirit thought to possess the body of another – has greatly influenced her work, and is intrinsically linked to her conception of irrepressible nature.
“That idea of the dybbuk taking over and consuming the human body is similar to this loss of control you get with a parasitic or plant entity that takes over a building or a highway.”
Cooper suggested that “zombie” or cordyceps fungus, which is found in the Amazon rainforest and infects a host, then replaces the latter’s tissue [think that scene in Planet Earth where the fungus kills an insect and starts growing out of its corpse], is similar to the idea of a dybbuk.
“It’s this automaton creature doing someone – or something – else’s bidding,” she said, adding that, as dybbuk is an abbreviation for dibbuk min ha-hizonim (“clinging from the outside”), hizonim can be translated as outsider.
“It’s that idea of the fear of the other, the fear of the strength of nature – his unexpected thing that we try to order.”
Her view of nature reclaiming the man-made world is not, however, wholly cynical. “I like looking at the ways feminist writers have reinterpreted these patriarchal stories [like that of the dybbuk],” she said.
She referred to Rachel Elior, an Israeli professor of Jewish philosophy at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, who says the dybbuk was a mechanism used by women or other marginalized groups to escape from an oppressive social order, “like putting a protective garment over top.”
“I like thinking that having these seemingly violent plants overtake our world is maybe a way of us being protected from this world we created… perhaps the dybbuk isn’t necessarily bad and the kudzu vines taking over whole valleys aren’t bad. Maybe this eventual symbiotic relationship [with the other] will start to occur.”