ArtYard in Frenchtown will present “Suleika Jaouad and Anne Francey: The Alchemy of Blood” through Sept. 22.
For reasons understandable, artists have struggled to represent cancer. Metaphorical and figurative approaches, allusions and vague expressions of encouragement and hope never feel adequate to the immensity of the disease. Straightforward reporting is often too brutal — and too scary — to endure. It isn’t easy to do justice to the pain, indeterminacy and sheer bewilderment that accompanies cancer treatment. Strike too hard and you may terrify the audience. Go too soft and risk emotional dishonesty about a subject that demands absolute candor.
“Suleika Jaouad and Anne Francey: The Alchemy of Blood” refuses to take the easy way out. The exhibition, which occupies the main first floor gallery of ArtYard in Frenchtown, does not skimp on the discomfort. These paintings and sculptures are the result of a firsthand encounter with something monstrous and ravenous.
Yet this show is, in its way, indirect. It features work by Jaouad, designed during a fearful period of isolation after a bone marrow transplant, alongside pieces created by Francey, her mother. Because the mother is a genuine visual artist and the daughter isn’t, “The Alchemy of Blood” works better as the tale of a concerned witness than it does as a survivor’s story. The daughter suffered the medical crisis, but the mother’s canvases and hanging sculptures are both the frame and the heart of this exhibition.
Given the daughter’s public profile, this might be surprising. Jaouad is the author of the bestselling “Between Two Kingdoms: A Memoir of a Life Interrupted,” an account of cancer that takes the reader from first symptoms to dire prognosis to frightening treatments to slow recovery and tenuous re-entry into the society of the healthy. (Signed copies are available at the ArtYard front desk.) Jaouad wrote the book in response to her initial diagnosis of leukemia in 2012, and followed it up with the popular (and related) video series, “Life, Interrupted.” The award-winning 2023 documentary “American Symphony” foregrounded her struggle. It is not inaccurate to call her a celebrity.
Yet cancers do not discriminate on the basis of popularity. Jaouad’s leukemia recurred in 2022, prompting another round of brutal treatments. Her 10 large-scale watercolors in “The Alchemy of Blood” were conceived in the unfathomable depths of mortal struggle.
By contrast, her mother’s contributions to the show don’t belong to a single moment in her story. Her grabby paintings of flowers, big as billboards, were made when she was pregnant with Jaouad three decades ago, and they contain all the turbulence and drama of lives coming into being. There is a deliberate feeling of incompleteness in these pieces, and plenty of room for a seed to germinate. These paintings are presented as the opening chapter of Jaouad’s story. But Jaouad is not a character in these paintings. She is an idea in her mother’s head and a feeling of stirring in her womb. Francey isn’t the first artist to use flowers as figures for birth. As nicely executed as these canvases are, you’ve seen work like this before.
“Palimpsest,” by Anne Francey.
Francey’s shields are another matter altogether. These extraordinary hanging sculptures are reason enough to make the trip to the banks of the Delaware. The artist drills tiny holes in the corners of rough rectangles of ceramic material, glazes them, tethers them together by thin string, and hangs her earthenware tapestries from metal dowels. Each piece is a discrete artwork in its own right. They are lovingly tinted and kiln-touched. Many are blank; others bear totemic illustrations, symbols and scribbled, incomprehensible writing.
In “Palimpsest,” Francey scrawls cursive letters at different angles on a grey shield marked, like a school chalkboard, with faint white streaks. On “Suleika’s Shield,” created in 2014, Francey shoots the works — grooved tiles, runic tiles, tiles with silhouettes of woodland creatures and birds in flight. The artist varies the stitching from shield to shield: Sometimes she fits her jigsaw pieces together with sturdy squares of sutures, sometimes she marks the spot with an x of thread, and sometimes there is nothing but a fragile em-dash of fabric. In one jaw-dropping piece, she does away with earthenware altogether and weaves a shield from the colored paper bracelets that encircle the wrists of hospital inpatients. The Sloan Kettering logo is visible on several of them, as is the name of her daughter.
These pieces shiver with insomniac worry. Unlike the flower paintings, they feel specific to a pressing problem. In design, the shields evoke protective traditions from around the world: Nordic runes, American Southwestern amulets, Far Eastern burial armor. The artist makes her erudition evident. Yet Francey’s primary inspiration feels closer to home. These tiles are the sort of accidental keepsakes that a fretting visitor might pick up off the floor of a hospital and hold as a ward against misfortune. Cancer turns the most scientific among us into believers in magic. In the face of our powerlessness, we turn to serendipity and scour the earth and skies for signs. In “The Alchemy of Blood,” Francey has done something very human. She has fashioned chainmail from lucky charms.
“Suleika’s Shield,” by Anne Francey.
Did Francey, fingers crossed against the fates, spend long nights fitting together incantation after incantation in a great and obsessive outpouring of hope? It would only be natural. She would have been doing what family members of the afflicted do — albeit in a more artistic manner than most of those who wait in hospital lobbies ever could. Her distraught pieces in “The Alchemy of Blood” are prayers against the darkness, dangling psalms, sacred vestments.
Yet no outward-facing shield can stop the progress of cancer. It doesn’t fly at its target like bullets and arrows do. Cancer attacks the body from the inside, and that is what makes it so terrifying, so unpredictable, and so difficult for artists to represent. Yes, Francey made these shields for her child. But just as importantly, she made them for herself.
Meanwhile, illness tugged Jaouad to an open battlefield where shielding herself wasn’t an option. Unable to operate in her primary medium — writing — she turned to the paintbrush.
It would be an understatement to call her hospital-made watercolors raw. Her paintings consistently foreground her ordeal. She appears in all of them, bald from chemotherapy, usually naked, impassive, hooked up to intravenous drips filled with blood. Then she sets herself adrift in a pastel-colored reverie populated by enormous animals and thick with overgrown vegetation.
In one, she balances atop a watermelon as her transfusion hangs from the tusks of a rearing elephant. In another, she is suspended over a rolling sea from the bill of a huge pink bird. Monkeys in the unsettling “Fertile Crescent” shear her head with golden scissors.
“The Kingdoms,” by Suleika Jaouad.
“The Kingdoms,” named in a callback to her memoir and its themes of transformation, follows her progress from a healthy woman to a bed-bound patient to a ravaged, crouching penitent on her knees in front of a mosque. Throughout, she is accompanied by beasts: a bear, a galloping horse, an enormous snail, a spitting snake. These fellow travelers are neither threatening nor particularly friendly. They are reflective of inner states, and a persistent fantasy of the outside world that has become off-limits to the endangered protagonist. When Jaouad gives her figure a halo, it feels appropriate. Who among us would deny her one?
Yet our sympathy for the painter does not make her paintings successful ones. The watercolors in “The Alchemy of Blood” were created as a form of therapy, and they have got that combination of exhaustion via artificial sedation, symbolism drawn from the natural world, and wild rush to completion common to art made in cancer wards. They are candid and courageous, but they are also primitive and uneven. Jaouad tells us that these were not made with an audience in mind, but here we are in a gallery, and there they hang on the walls. At some point, Jaouad (and Francey) decided that works that had been made for the purposes of survival were fit for public presentation.
Their exhibition alongside fully realized pieces by the artist’s mother doesn’t do them any favors. While Francey’s personal story intersects profoundly with her daughter’s, her art does not. There is very little crosstalk between the floral paintings and ceramic shields and Jaouad’s series of 10 medicated hallucinations. The watercolors feel deeply indebted to other artists: Francesco Clemente and his bent reveries, Hannah Wilke’s searing images of lymphoma-related trauma, and especially Frida Kahlo’s juxtapositions of pained bodies with creatures from a natural world where that body is prohibited to go.
“Fertile Crescent,” by Suleika Jaouad.
The parallel that “The Alchemy of Blood” draws between the pregnant parent and the sickness-ravaged daughter is a weak one, and doesn’t bear up under the weight of scrutiny. Though bodies are in transition, the singular experience of cancer doesn’t allow for many easy analogues. Giving birth it is not.
Thus, it is probably best and most rewarding to approach “The Alchemy of Blood” not as an extension of the work of a celebrated memoirist, but as a mother’s tale. We are shown the vexed but fruitful energy of creation, the concern over the development of her child, and the protective desperation of the sleepless nights spent helpless, clinging to amulets, as her daughter fights for her life.
Suleika Jaouad’s watercolors become a reference to the sad story that motivates the making of the shields. Anne Francey’s artworks are profound gestures of faith in serendipity and wild, intense wishes flung into the darkness. They are forged by necessity: the need to believe that there is something — anything — we can do to turn the tide.
“Suleika Jaouad and Anne Francey: The Alchemy of Blood” will be at ArtYard in Frenchtown through Sept. 22. Visit artyard.org.
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