Jon Field
Jon Field, Mottoes 1 – 8, 2020, digital images. Images courtesy Jon Field.
In the early seventeenth century, Lady Anne Bacon Drury of Suffolk, England, created a tiny painted room in her massive country house consisting of panels of pictures with accompanying Latin mottoes. A life-long Puritan, Lady Anne used this closet as a kind of three-dimensional book, the panels functioning as objects of meditation.
What is striking about her project, and what brings pause for thought in our current social and political climate, is that although it is over four hundred years old, it resonates as much today as it did then. These meditations defy cultural and historical boundaries.
How were we so deceived? she asks in one panel.
Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.
Lady Anne never considered herself an artist, nor intended her project to be considered as art. Rather, she considered her work a form of spiritual and political guidance. My aim here is to honor this intention. In keeping with the overarching theme of SOCIAL/AFFECTS, I present eight of these mottoes, translated directly from Lady Anne’s panels. These mottoes have already been silkscreened onto wooden panels and are currently displayed in public spaces in England, France and the United States. Here they are available to print freely and distribute throughout your community. Like Lady Anne, I hope they provide pause for thought in these troubling times.
Jon Field was born in Manchester, England in 1963, and was educated at Lancaster University, receiving his doctorate in 1998. After twenty years working in the United States, he now lives in Ipswich, England. His work is the subject of a feature article published in Art Papers: Elegiac Documents: The Presidents’ Favorite Paintings (March/April 2009). In 2011 he was awarded ‘Best in Show’ for A Charge to Keep in Text + Texture, juried by internationally respected curator Dan Cameron. His work is the subject of an interview with Chief Editor Steve Knudsen in a recent edition of ArtPulse magazine, as well as a Studio Visit article by Jared Butler in burnaway.org. His article ‘The Painted Closet Of Jonathan David Field’ was published by Floromancy in 2020. https://www.jonfield.net/