The view never ends from the weathered porch of Joan Jonas’ summer home on a hill on Cape Breton Island, off the tip of Nova Scotia. Just beyond a dense tree, the bay of St. Lawrence sways in a gradient of blue, a cobalt horizon hovering where the sea meets the sky.
For decades, the view has served as the summer backdrop for New York artists, including Richard Serra, Philip Glass, Robert Frank and June Leaf, who seek rugged beauty, anonymity and temperate weather.
For Jonas, who arrived with friends in the 70s, it was a canvas.
“I had played in it,” she said of the landscape in a recent interview, her voice rough and raw but not rude. “He inspired me. What can I say?”
Many honors have been bestowed on Jonas in an attempt to sum up her trailblazing legacy and elusive spirit: trailblazer, mystic, steadfast, trailblazer of eco-feminism, mainstream video and performance artist. A new report, “Goodnight Goodmorning,” at the Museum of Modern Art, brings these genres together in a sweeping retrospective of the 87-year-old artist’s multimedia career and includes still images of “Nova Scotia Beach Dance” (1971), one of Jonas’ first Cape Breton performances. , which audience members reportedly saw from the vantage point of a cliff.
He also drew on the island’s imagery and local traditions. “They Come to Us Without a Word,” her installation at the 2015 Venice Biennale, featured vivid projections of Jonas, the animals and the bees layered with ghost stories told in Cape Breton oral tradition.
Jonas’ nephew, London-based photographer Toby Coulson, had heard stories about Cape Breton. As a budding artist, Coulson, 39, who grew up in Britain and whose father is Jonas’ half-brother, delighted in visits to his aunt’s loft in Manhattan’s SoHo, where relics of the Canadian wilderness filled the walls and crevices . He took portraits of Jonas in 2018 when she had one exhibition at the Tate Modern, but he couldn’t shake the urge to photograph her in the seaside setting he had seen in her work. So he set out to capture what he could — Jonas’s vigor and playfulness. her home as a studio and her surrounding wild beauty.
Plans were discussed for a summer visit, but Covid delayed things. Finally, in July 2022, Coulson, his partner, Clarisse d’Arcimoles, and their two young children, took a 10-day trip to Cape Breton.
They took a seven-hour flight from London to Halifax, drove four hours northeast and finally down a winding dirt road to Jonas’ home on the coast.
“It looked like a newly discovered land,” he said. The sounds of nature and silence flooded him.
The two-story house was rickety, Coulson recalled, and the hot water fleeting. Celtic bric-a-brac decorated the interior, reflecting the island Celtic roots. Strands of glistening seaweed, grooved shells and smooth stones were strewn everywhere.
“She is an artist in her job,” Coulson said. “Even the way she dresses, even her knife and fork and her plate, everything.”
Much of the decor was found at “Myles from Nowhere,” a local antique shop with no heat, no lights, and no water.
“When it gets dark, I go home,” Miles Kehoe, the owner, said in a telephone interview.
The shop, where mobile phones are prohibited, is filled with vintage items. He and Jonas, friends for over 30 years, share a love of rustic, handmade items.
“I had the ugliest plane you’d ever seen in your entire life and, well, I knew who was going to love it,” Kehoe said with a laugh.
“I kind of know what he wants,” he continued. “So if I find something, I just put it aside for her and wait until next year. And he usually gets everything.”
This was the case for a collection of tiny log houses that Kehoe found at a yard sale. Some had cellophane windows to look like stained glass. all built with salvaged materials.
“He turned it around,” Kehoe said.
One of these wooden structures, a small-scale pagoda, is featured in the MoMA exhibit.
“He collects very unusual things,” Jonas said. “And I often find props and objects. It could be all about my work or it could just be for display. I don’t differentiate.”
In addition to handmade objects, marine themes and a fixation on wind appear as central motifs in Jonas’ work, including “Waltz” (2003), a series of totemic rituals with masks and mirrors on a shore near the forest in Nova Scotia, and “Moving Off the Land” (2018), a meditation on the ocean and its fragile, life-giving ecology.
Coulson set out to capture the deep-rooted influences of the island in her work. Most days, Jonas, Coulson, and his family hiked the beach, cooked in the modest kitchen where pans hung from steel spikes, and in the evenings hid from the mosquitoes and horseflies behind the enclosed porch.
“It’s just blue and green and sky and it’s kind of liberating,” Coulson said. “You could see where her work came from and what inspired her.”
Not that Jonas would put it in those terms. “There’s always an overlap and an influence, but I can’t really say what it is,” he said. “It’s a mystery.”
The whole time Coulson had his camera, he noticed: Jonas, who is only five feet tall, walks across the hot sand in slow motion. collecting stones; lying in the shallow water. swimming — these days it’s breast only, easier for mobility.
“Every day I’ve been working up until now to ask her to take a picture,” he said.
For decades, Jonas, a serious swimmer, went down the cliffs twice a day. Steep bluffs are harder to negotiate now, he said. Drives down when the water is not too rough.
“I would go every day if I could,” he said. “I showered on the beach.”
Jonas first went to Cape Breton in the early 1970s with a group of friends to visit his nearby farm Fluxus artist Geoffrey Hendricks.
“It was really beautiful and magical,” she said. “And I liked the other people up there, so that was an added bonus.”
She acquired the land for her oceanfront hilltop in 1975 and partnered with a local builder to build the log home. At first, the house had no interior walls, and only kerosene lamps. A summer resident, he was without electricity or plumbing for the first five years.
“I lived in it when it was just a bare shell,” he said. “Slowly I made it to a comfortable place.”
Built like a local farmhouse, with shingles, it was originally 20 by 24 feet. Then came the porch: long and wooden. And in the early ’90s, a 20-by-12-foot studio addition flooded with natural light.
Although the island has long attracted avant-garde types – writers, performance artists, photographers and composers who spent their days making art, evenings dancing in a town square or hosting each other for dinner – it was not.’ As an artist colony, Jonas was quick to note. Geography alone expands the definition of neighbor (it’s common for friends to live about 20 miles apart). Most people fill their days with productive work — in solitude.
Jeri Coppola, a photography and installation artist, first came to Cape Breton as an archivist and house curator for Lynn Davis, Rudy Wurlitzer, Helen Tworkov and Philip Glass in the early 90s. She became friends with Jonas a few years later.
“It’s not a tourist destination,” Coppola said. “There’s nothing to do but work on your job.”
With sunsets at 21:00 in summer, the days are triple with light, luxuriously long.
Coppola (no relation to the filmmakers) recalled a day at Jonas’ house when Hendrix and the artist Sur Rodney had finished. Jonas began filming the two men wandering the trees of the forest behind her house, which Coppola calls “the fairy forest.” It turned into a spontaneous performance of Geoff and Sur responding to the scenery.
“I can work in a more expansive way than in New York,” Jonas said. “It’s a little more bare, a little more empty. I like this.”
Coulson’s shots captured the mundane and the sublime: hazy coastal landscapes, an artist’s scattered materials. portraits of Jonas and her curled-up poodle, Ozu; golden hour shades and playful mirrors, unfurling by Jonas himself charm with reflections.
“It felt like a really pure form of photography,” Coulson said. “We only took a few pictures each day.”
One of his photographs on view at MoMA shows Jonas towering over the tiny village, her stature staggering and her presence magnificent.