With this new exhibition of work at MO_Space, IsJumalon continues the trajectory set by her previous series of work, exhibitedat West Gallery earlier this year. AGarden in the Chest explores invented landscapes as spaces of retreat andrecognition, a form of resistance against a world that demands control. Here,Jumalon furthers this notion by looking at perception and memory through thelens of containment, utilising the puddle as the primary visual metaphor.Jumalon wrangles emotional terrains into these vessels, creating the idea ofspace as both a natural body and metaphysical container, in an attempt to holdin everything that threatens to spill out.

For Jumalon, the garden inside the chest is personal,alive, and growing. Everything is entwined and tangled, but held inside andcontrolled. To focus on a puddle — that which reflects, distorts, absorbs, andremembers — forces a pause for internal reflection. Grown from the personal needto find stillness in the face of overwhelming experiences, these images steerone towards moments of contemplation, serving as small, quiet spaces that stillhold something powerful.

By imagining these landscapes and capturing them inimages, Jumalon distills personal reflections into spaces that are familiar butslightly out of reach, in terms of absolute recognition. These result in imagesof places that feel known but not quite nameable. Based on the artist’s ownphotographs, the images are wrought through a process of fragmentation andaggregation. Meant more to be held than seen, these paintings contain memoryrather than memorabilia, eliciting personal specific tethers, depending on whoviews them and what they take from the work. Destabilising the perceptions ofthe viewer, these images recall certain memories, but do not quite reflect themprecisely, the full meaning of the work shifting with the viewer.

Approaching these new works with a sense of naivete,Jumalon recalibrates her process and reintroduces old methods and mediums,recalling how she used to draw. She is deliberate in communicating in a visuallanguage that favours crudeness and rawness to polished perfection.

Playing with scale displays a range from the personaland intimate to larger and more encompassing feelings, and Jumalon has createdthese works as places of personal refuge, providing geographies of commonality.Here, small and internal experiences commune together as shared common ground.Larger representations of space may create a feeling of awe and the grandiose,but this collection of new work shows that capturing both grand and smallerfeelings in a puddle is meaningful, too.

Constructed from memory, observation, and a process ofintuitive arrangement, each piece communicates the artist’s personal journeyboth physically (be it on foot, on her motorcycle, or on some other type oftransport) and internally. Some compositions are moments of pause and refuge,while others lean into structure, repetition, and a quiet tension.

“This act of piecing things together becomes a way tohold what cannot always be put into words,” she writes. A Garden in the Chest explores how internal and externalenvironments meet, often within ourselves, and how we carry fragments of thespaces we inhabit within ourselves. How form and feeling can overlap throughthe art of making.

-Carina Santos

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