Substantia Jones is an award-winning photographer, lecturer, and Fat Liberation activist whose work has been exhibited in galleries and museums across the globe.
Substantia will have her photography piece, Giant Forest/Ancient Perspective, shown at the Sierra Club Hoosier Chapter exhibition, Human/Nature, in October and November at the Indiana Interchurch Center. More information on the exhibition can be found here.
Substantia Jones's Giant Forest/Ancient Perspective will be showing at the exhibition.
Q1: What is your earliest memory of interacting with nature?
Aside from my never-ending hunt for box turtles, quicksand, and flowering wild plants I'd run home and look up in our 1960s World Book Encyclopedia, my most profound childhood connection with nature came as the result of my admiration for Native American culture. Or rather, the revisionist distortions fed to us through our mid-century textbooks. I discovered the wet soil from the peachy-hued banks of a nearby creek could be used as clay. I began fabricating my versions of household tools for use in my post-runaway life, which I plotted pretty much on the daily. Between the exposed roots at the base of a tree in the woods near my home I'd tuck my growing stash of clumsily rendered spoons, bowls, cups, and such. I continued this until another aspect of nature intervened and created in me an organic, garden-variety loss of interest. Fueled by my discovery of music through my big brother's headphones.
Q2: How does the natural world influence your work as an artist?
My photography is my activism, helping my fellow fat people create their own visibility. Visibility too often denied by our culture and media, yet no less vital than it is for those who reap it in abundance. Unless I'm shooting on the road, most of my photographs happen in a sunshiny studio or on a Manhattan street. One would assume nature rarely influences my work, which is more about fists in the air and concrete beneath feet. But without being personally sustained by nature, none of these unapologetic images could happen. When I wake in the morning, I can see the sunrise over the East River, before lifting my head from the pillow. In Autumn, I can witness flora's life cycle at its most glorious in Central Park. And in the Spring, when New York City's flowering cherry trees are in full rage, I watch them conspire with architecture and iron to complement one another. So while my work may not immediately reveal it, nature influences all that I do, all that I create, all that I am.
Q3: What role do you think artists have in helping to promote or protect nature and the environment?
Artists--both visual and non--have tremendous power to purvey and promote ideas, information, and calls to action. As long as the line between art and audience remains open. Artists encourage people to see nature appreciatively, to experience it more deeply, to find it where it previously went unnoticed. Artists help us to contemplate our role in nature's future, and its role in ours. Artists are the advertising agency for the natural world.
Q4: What message do you hope people take with them from your piece(s) in the Human/Nature exhibition?
When once asked to do a calendar signing event in California's Bay Area, I reveled at the opportunity (with ten hours of driving by my patient model/friend) to fulfill a lifelong dream and visit the Giant Forest in Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Park. Photographers often use nature to enhance their portraiture. If trees could talk, they'd likely beg for a break from graduates and newly engaged couples climbing all up on 'em whilst someone instructs them to smile. I knew I wanted to flip that script. Create a photographic power exchange between humans and nature. In order to fully capture the massive size of the ancient Sequoias, I had the aforementioned model/friend use her body to enhance the trees, disrobing, and striking a worshipful pose, not only to provide the needed visual context, but also to remind that we are the stewards of our natural world, yet we are dominated by nature's enduring value and might.
I go out of my way to avoid guiding the observer toward a universal interpretation of my photographs. But in this case, I hope that's the takeaway. It certainly is for me.
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Substantia Jones is based in New York.