Long Way Home

Anima Mundi
St Ives, UK
21.10.22 - 05.12.22

Much of Jonathan Michael Ray’s art practice, primarily sculptural, utilizing a diverse and ever growing skillset of medium and mode, has become deeply connected to his surroundings. Routine exploration of the landscape, both rural and urban, often leads to a gathering of artefacts that may then become the basis of new works. Though potentially far removed from their origin, through a process of reassembly, these materials imbue each piece with rich, multi-layered histories, that in turn communicate something of the physical and metaphysical experience.

Long Way Home embraces this duality, where works are loosely divided to perhaps reflect both the journey through the exterior landscape and an internal journey in search of something other.

In the first exhibition space sits Earthen Cairn which is comprised of a tall stack of river worn bricks, imitating a chimney, reminiscent of those that populate the Cornish landscape, and stands perhaps as a ruin and memorial to a bygone age of industry. An Irregular Ode to an Unknown Craftsman depicts a flint wall, contradictorily made with leaded glass and hung like a pub sign. It is a combination which both evokes the potential fragility of prosaic tradition and seeks to celebrate how identity and definition of community is somehow upheld through the generations, through an unspoken awareness of ‘the old ways’ and ‘the lay of the land’. The second room presents two engraved limestone blocks placed among stained glass compositions and relic like objects. With Holy Reunion, fragmented saints, that would have once gazed towards the heavens in unity, are now re-arranged, segregated and searching in disembodied and disorientated confusion. In the works Each Figure Now a Phantom and Pulvis et Umbra Sumas, curious items found in flea markets and antique shops are arranged by Ray into shrine-like memorials which further embellish their mystery.

The inherent qualities of the materials and objects - their forming, age, stories and passage - all play inexplicit yet vital roles within Ray’s oeuvre. Whether responding to graffiti from historical sites, reconfigured antique stained glass reclaimed from church windows, or elaborate framing methods for his own photography, the works are filled with cryptic yet deeply felt declarations. In this palimpsestic fusion of the age-old and the transient, the passage of time folds in on itself becoming a distillation which we call the ‘now’. Ray’s whispered messages rhyme a tune that is melancholic yet simultaneously playful, heartfelt and enduring. One where we can perhaps recognize and meditate on something of our collective past, present and future.

Images of exhibition by Oliver Udy.

“Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference”

— Robert Frost ‘The Road Not Taken’