Cosmic Taxonomy

'In the worlds [Bates} builds, language has authority, so it’s no wonder that her diagrammatic work – accented with classroom-esque primary colours and strong contrasts – forms a sort of infrastructure. Visual fragments often depict imagery from underwater and outer space, ancient environs mostly unknown despite running parallel to us. Bates uses their alien position to communicate a comfortable “unknowingness”. Ultimately, we are invited in to deconstruct, unpack, and make sense of things in a way which feels accessible. By abandoning the chase for objectivity, we allow the world around us to be wonderfully complex and malleable.

Maybe we can, as Jennie does, perceive Cosmic Taxonomy as a Cabinet of Curiosities, a now-antiquated room designed to hold the sprawling interests of its Curator. ‘It was a new concept for me. Someone I was on a residency with last year introduced me to it as they [felt it was] fitting for my work,’ Bates says. ‘Back in the olden days,’ she explains, providing some context, ‘those who could afford to collect things would amass artworks, artifacts, specimens, etcetera, and, sort of, curate these collections [...] however they wanted, and often they would attach their own “false” meanings and origins to the objects. [...] The Cabinet of Curiosities is kind of a proto-museum.’ Jennie shows me a painting of the same name by Domenico Remps (c. 1690), and it reminds me a bit of her dioramas. However, the more time spent looking, the more they differ. Paintings of voyages, globes, skulls, and war regalia begin to reveal a colonial subtext. ‘It ties in with how I work – trying to categorise and arrange stuff and ascribe meaning to things in a way that misses the point sometimes. I wanted the space to feel a bit like someone’s private collection, or [a pseudoscientific investigation] into the nature of things.’

Taxonomy is the classification of things. And sense-making seems to be a Cosmic task. Bates’ Cabinet of Curiosities brims with her figurative and playful fixations; her love for how physics articulates the abstract and helps her see connections between things; and her background in illustration. Jennie’s hoarding of things ‘manifest as a sensibility in the work.’ Cosmic Taxonomy is also a thing – originating as a ‘rhythmic loop’ or earworm before being added to her collection. Every fragment, every refrain, every thing can be used to challenge widely accepted truths and norms in our everyday visual language.' 

- from a longer text by Jaz Morrison