“Are we using flowers, or are they using us?” James Jessiman on sci-fi, antiques and tulips

Let’s begin at the beginning. Tell me about your practice and interests.

The key element of the practice is exploring the relationship between humans and objects. Collecting objects, and an interest in value and scarcity, have always been prominent in my life. I was raised in a family of antique dealers and collectors. As a child, I was immersed in flicking through auction catalogues and absorbing objects like bronzes, furniture and toys. There’s also an alien, otherworldly element of the work, originating from sci-fi novels that my grandparents collected. This interplay between antiques, toys, collectables, science fiction and has been consistent in my work from the beginning.

And why tulips?

I’m interested in how flowers are so deeply associated with emotions like lust, envy and desire. I think that links strongly to this notion of collecting. In the 1600s, Tulipmania – [a period during the Dutch Golden Age when contract prices for some bulbs of the recently introduced and fashionable tulip reached extraordinarily high levels and then dramatically crashed] – drove men mad, absolutely crazy. That is a powerful thing to tap into, especially around collecting. It’s similar to the way that someone might pursue a love interest; with complete obsession, and total desire.

There’s always a playfulness with the media you choose. Sometimes the materials you use are deceiving – it’s not clear if something’s heavy or light. Is that intentional?

It breeds a sense of satisfaction in the work if I can be ambiguous with materials. The intention is not to trick the viewer but to bring a certain sense of magic to the sculptures. For instance, as the bronzes are painted, when you pick them up you find they weigh two or three times more than you might have expected. There’s a masking of the material.

What drew you to make this new body of work for NADA Miami?

It started with an intense period of obsession and research that ended in an adventure. I stumbled across Diana Everett’s The Genus Tulipa: Tulips of the World, (2013). She had gone to Central Asia and documented all of the tulips that grow wild in and around Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan and Kazakhstan. An enormous history was revealed that linked with my interests in collecting, scarcity and value. I became obsessed.

Within a week, I was on a flight to Uzbekistan and driving into the mountains to find and catalogue several species of tulips. They grow in completely barren landscapes, appearing as just a glimpse of colour; like little beacons in a very desolate landscape. And you will see a vivid red or a vivid yellow. Photographing them was a way of starting a collection.

There’s this great quote by Baudrillard who talks about the ‘collectors’ mindset’. It’s something that I feel adjacent to, which is that the collector never really wants to complete the collection, because for them, that represents death – they can’t resist moving on to chase something else. So I ended up hunting these tulips in the mountains. There was a sense of romance to travel halfway across the world to see a flower.

There is a very intensely human feeling of being trapped by desire. When I got back, I started to sketch out a few different species of my own design, influenced by psychedelic aesthetics and science fiction to create these bizarre tulips that we are now showing in Miami.

It might be important to talk about the material itself. And how that links conceptually to the work.

These works are cast bronze. The material process mimics an early 1900s artistic style: cold painted bronze. It’s a largely out of fashion Viennese technique that was incredibly popular in the early 1900s. At the time, it was a way of depicting far-flung locations. Cold-painted bronzes were almost fetishistic, idealising exotic locations that nowadays are easily accessible. Displayed like scale models, these curios functioned like postcards. In a way, this is exactly what my work is doing. Except now, it’s very difficult to find areas of the world which are inaccessible, hence their otherworldly, hard-to-pinpoint, colours and forms. I really enjoy feeling alien to a place – I hope audiences will feel this way when seeing the new works.

Talk to me about the alien nature of the sculptures. Their shape and colour palette has an unnatural feeling.

To me, the most otherworldly occurrences are actually things that happen in a very natural way. That could be the way a seed can grow without food and with only water, or, how one can enter a desolate mountain or barren landscape and see brightly coloured tulips emerging from the earth – almost peacocking – but for what audience? For the optical pleasure of others or for self-preservation? With flowers, it’s unclear whether they are using us or we’re using them. For me, this possibility goes beyond anything natural and it’s like we are in the world of science fiction.

I understand the shared title, Terraformer, means ‘earth shaping’?

All the works have Latin names to give the pretence they are species that have been discovered. The larger one is titled Problem Child, another is titled Gate of Desire, which translates in Latin to Tulipa Porta Desiderii. The Terraformer element is related to the bases, they appear as energy packs like they might be able to be sent to another planet, to sample whether the environment is fit for life – fit for tulips.