Terrific Visions, an essay about Jen Clay

A number of methods characterize Clay’s “friendly aesthetic,” with attraction adaptations similar to those in plant biology. Texture, form, and color interact to capture a curious, uninhibited attention. When a monster draws in the viewer with a cuteness informed by popular edutainment, the work often “bites” in the details, as in a slogan beneath an limb-like flap that reads “the world doesn’t belong to you”. 

In Jeff Vandermeer’s novel Annihilation, Area X’s mysteriously alive tower sprouts words somehow captured from human visitors. The regurgitated text appears re-embodied, and, once it attracts a reader, the organisms forming the words expel spores which infect the viewer. Those looping lines of text sewn into the flesh of Clay’s monsters have a similar ambiguity; are they part of the body or utterances? Or both? An organism culling words out of the ether and representing them echoes the uncanniness of Chatbots’ remittances. When humans tattoo stories onto their bodies, are they absorbing the pictures and texts into their corporeal being, just as they wear it? 

Clay’s choice of fabric, palette, and forms all center the cultural inputs proximate to her childhood in semi-rural North Carolina. Television shows like Yo Gabba Gabba and Sesame Street infused her visions which seemed at first to be imaginary friends. Now, the fabrics she collects hew toward the craft store kitsch. The quilting technique also lies close to home, though this is where she defies expectations of the medium, using a cutting-edge sewing technology to create ever more elaborate stitchwork. 

The friendliness is her overarching strategy for softening otherwise terrifying other-ness. With these “friendly aesthetics” she encourages engagement with monsters who materialize personal, societal, planetary and cosmic fears. Indeed, it’s critical that Clay’s trap and salve is softness with relevance, we think, in the many ways of considering horror beyond those we’ve mentioned here. Suggestions of a different perspective lie in the nature of her works’ attraction strategies. Instead of the overt aggression of monsters like H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu or the many other creatures from the pantheon of fear, her figures are cushioned, bright and slightly goofy. Their quilted and tufted surfaces invite touch and the flaps tempt physical engagement. Her figures’ disobediant bodies do not align with societal categories or human expectations. And yet, there is something deeply unsettling about them.

In particular, Clay layers anxiety of impending disasters among first hand struggles with mental illness. In her work, she troubles the lines containing sanity, questioning the boundaries between being and nonbeing, human and nonhuman, hallucination and vision, a the earth with humans and a planet without humans.  Her creatures may once have been bodies, some human and some animalistic, that were overtaken by nonhuman growths whose features are taken from plant life, viruses, bacteria, and fungus. All of these occupy human bodies but, when magnified, are monstrous.