Bodiless heads and headless bodies

A radical vegetal alternative to the mind/body divide | Green Man: In conversation with Jakob Rowlinson

Jakob Rowlinson, Suede Dreams (detail), 2024. Digital jacquard tapestry with leather, braid, cotton thread, and mask (leather shoe, zip, vintage belt, painted eyes, gold lead, waxed cotton thread)

It has been a while since I last posted to my Substack. Life gets busy very quickly, especially when only working part-time! So I’ve decided to stop putting pressure on myself to create something perfectly polished, and I am instead putting together a few thoughts to share. These are inspired by a recent chat with artist Jakob Rowlinson - find an edited excerpt from our interview below.

During our conversation, we ended up discussing the “green man”, one of the most mysterious motifs of Medieval architecture. It is a human face surrounded by vegetation, often with leaves in the mouth – but are they entering the mouth and subsuming the human, or are they spewing out, a leafy language, perhaps?

In her introduction to the book, Plant Horror: Approaches to the Monstruous Vegetal in Fiction and Film, Dawn Keetley argues that the Green Man is intended to remind churchgoers that, even as we raise our eyes and thoughts to heaven, we are all destined to become food for plants in the end. The Green Man also speaks to plants’ disconcerting tendency to grow in all directions. Unlike animals, whose bodies are organised into discrete organs, plants have a dispersed physiognomy. It is possible to cut off part of a plant without doing it any harm – to “deadhead”. Attached as we are to our notion of the skull-bound brain and the mind-body divide, plants’ distributed biology is somehow uncanny. As Keetley has suggested, the leafy amalgamation of head and body represented by the Green Man expresses this horror.

We also find this motif in the 14^th century poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, in which a mysterious knight who is “grass-green and greener still” challenges Sir Gawain to strike him, if Sir Gawain will agree to receive a blow in return a year and a day later. Sir Gawain decapitates the Green Knight, who cheerfully picks up his head and reminds Sir Gawain of his promise before riding away. This plant-like resilience to beheading is deeply unnerving.

In my research and writing, I have come to see bodiless heads and headless bodies as a small motif of a radical vegetal alternative to patriarchal models, challenging the essentialism of the mind/body divide. I have written of a spectral Anne Boleyn, her head planted like a bulb to grow new shoots, and of Millais’ half-submerged Ophelia, mouth open in death or song, surrounded by scattered flowers. Then there is Orpheus, the singer who gathered a forest around him to listen to his tales of metamorphosis, including the stories of Daphne and Myrrh, women transformed into trees. At the end of his life, he is beheaded by a group of wild women. His head is thrown into a river and continues to sing as it floats away into eternity.

There’s a gendering at play in these examples, stories of women wronged or raped or enraged, as well as a hybridity of human and plant bodies that disrupts heterosexual gender relations and queers the space between human and non-human species.

---

Green Man: In Conversation with Jakob Rowlinson

Jakob Rowlinson, Mask VII (Post-Metamorphosis), 2024. Leather, shoes, eyelets, and pins.

AS: What are you working on at the moment?

JR: My main focus is on a project in Wakefield, Yorkshire, developed from my recent residency at Yorkshire Sculpture Park. A lot of my work is a sort of myth building or world building, and I've been wanting to create a new myth for this project. And I knew I wanted to use sound to activate the landscape. I’m drawing on Tolkein’s mythology and his idea that the creation story of all about a song, where evil enters in the form of discord, an out-of-tune thing. Most myths, be they Christian or be they Greco-Roman or even Babylonian, they all have a similar creation story where there is chaos – often a very demonized feminine energy that's chaotic – and then a masculine straight figure comes in and poses order.

And for this project, I want to think about that queerly and disrupt that gendered myth, drawing on Tolkein’s alternative story. I have decided to use sound as a metaphor, so rather than having a musical piece, it is going to be a cacophony of overlapping sounds, animated and interrupted by various sculptures.

AS: It’s so interesting to think that Western culture is built on those gendered creation stories – and that fundamental binary narrative perhaps informs so many of the problematic discourses we find around gender and the more-than-human world. So it’s an interesting challenge to come up with something that doesn't use those tropes.

JK: There is often a dichotomy of masculine and feminine across cultures; for instance, most sun gods tend to be male and most moon goddesses are female. These binaries can be alluring, but I’m also interested in queering and disrupting them. I spent a long time thinking about how to do that without ending up using other stereotypes. And in this process, I am trying to write a new sort of myth.

Jakob Rowlinson, A Supple Malediction (detail), 2024. Assorted buttons, sword charms, leather shoes, leather hides, kilt pin, eyelets, cotton thread, waxed cotton thread, rings, steel armature.

I have been making forms based on the proboscis of a butterfly, and I have been making leather butterflies as well. I have often worked with found leather, such as garments or shoes. And often they are tied with some sort of memory for me, like my mum's old leather jacket, which I used to dress up in as a kid. So a lot of work has had material memories. But more recently, I've been working with raw hides, but I’ve been treating them by staining them or marbling them. I'm still playing around with it, but treating the material in a different way is quite exciting.

I'm playing with the butterfly because I did a residency at Yorkshire Sculpture Park and they have a fantastic butterfly sort of reservation and sanctuary. It's an obvious metaphor, but the butterfly is just so evocative: the shape, the patterns, the defensive nature of those large eyes on the wings. Those eyes are flamboyant and extravagant as well as defensive, meaning there are a lot of queer connotations there. They might be quite obvious, but I don’t think that means they shouldn’t be explored.

AS: I think the most successful art is accessible on several levels. When there's a central metaphor that people can understand quite quickly, that can offer a pathway into further understanding and having the confidence to read into the more nuanced layers.

Can you talk me through the show I saw last year at Huxley Parlour?

JR: So in that show, Thirteen Fools, I kept coming back to the motif of the Green Man. The exhibition was spawned by my interest in tarot imagery, alchemy, and what we could call magic. It’s something that has been in resurgence again in the last decade or so, just as it was in the 70s or perhaps the late Victorian period. What is it about those periods of time that spark this interest in the esoteric and the occult? They are periods of intense societal shift and uncertainty, and in the current time there is a sense of the queer community feeling somewhat separate and therefore looking to alternative ways of healing and finding imagery that speaks to them. The “green man” works draw on a childhood memory from the churches near where I grew up, where there were these hybrid human-plant faces. And that led to these masks I made from soles of the shoes.

For the new project, I’m hoping to use sound to somehow activate the masks. I’ve also been working to create ocarinas [small wind instruments] based on the shape of the butterfly proboscis. Making them is proving a real learning curve: getting the chamber correct, getting the sounds correct, and thinking about frequencies.

AS: Have you had any advice from an instrument maker or have you just been experimenting to see what works?

JR: I took a little advice, but obviously an instrument maker really wants to pitch them correctly with all the notes, and I got worried that I was going to end up making them too musical. So I've deliberately stopped that and now they're out of tune. One or two of them have double chambers, so you can play two wind pieces at a time, which is very rare, and which offers exciting potential for live performance. I'm taking inspiration from Zelda, which was a very 90s Japanese video game, but then also English and Irish folk music as well. But I’m not really a musician myself, which I think is a good thing.

Jakob Rowlinson, Mask VIII (Endymion Turned), 2023. Punched leather, buckles, rings, studs, eyelets and trimmings.

AS: I’ve been trying my hand at Wassailing this January, and in May there’s a Jack in the Green festival in my town, run by all these folk musicians and dancers. It's brilliant fun, but also no one's pretending that it's a really old tradition that's been going on for centuries.

JR: It’s so interesting how those festivals have been re-established in a certain way. I'm quite interested in how our perceptions of the medieval or the folk or the past really say a lot more about our present. We always reinvent the past to suit us. And I think that today, there's also certain desire to attribute sexual liberation to a medieval or folkloric past. It’s upsetting gender roles in a way as well.

AS: Yes, we have those filters through which we see the past. Something I read a while ago, but which has stuck with me, is the introduction to a book on plant horror by Dawn Keetley, in which she suggests that the Green Man of medieval architecture is almost the origin of the plant horror trope. There’s an idea that the Green Man is a head without a body, but also the architecture is the body. So it's a really complex idea of headlessness or bodilessness, which I find really interesting as a way of maybe moving beyond the mind-body divide, which is really central to that whole system of binaries we were talking about.

JR: That’s fascinating! Do you know Bob Mills’ writings about the woodwose? It's sort of a cousin of the Green Man found particularly around Norfolk and Suffolk - a figure completely covered in hair. Bob Mills talks about our human obsession with body hair and both our disgust and fetishisation of it. In the past, there were also very strict rules about what hair you could wear: ermine is the most luxuriant, and then velvet, etc. But a “motley” is the mix of fabrics that a Fool or jester would wear – which gives license to behave in a different way. And likewise, the woodwose is completely covered in this of hair and is both an outsider and also sometimes a guardian spirit. I’m exploring this link with hairiness through my masks, which often have threads hanging off them.

AS: I didn’t know about the woodwose, that’s fascinating. Gawain is interesting as well – he’s a knight “grass green and greener still”, who is beheaded but simply picks up his head and rides away. It’s interesting that you started by talking about Tolkein and his creation myths, because the canonical version of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight in the original Middle English is the one that Tolkien edited.

JR: Yes, it's all making sense! All these things are linked together, aren't they?

Read more about Jakob’s work here

---

This newsletter is free for now…

…but in the future I hope to turn on paid subscriptions to make it sustainable for me. In the meantime, I’d love to hear any feedback and whether you might be happy to upgrade to a paid tier in the future!