Mella Jaarsma

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Blanket Talks – series 2, 2024

Woodblock print on cotton, leather, embroidered emblems, digital prints on bond, re-used teak wood

Jaarsma has created a new work commissioned for LB03 from her Blanket Talks series, a mixed-mediamixed media installation platform for discursive performances. The artist designed and created 8 different woodblock stamps produced in Lahore and Yogyakarta. She then stamped and printed on diverse material substrates found locally in Indonesia and Pakistan, such as fabric, tree bark, straws, and bamboo leaf. Like footprints that indicate carbon output, these woodblock marks become tangible traces recording human activities, light or heavy, positive or negative, recent or historic. Two blankets are woven as a patchwork of these prints, combining the measurement of space between rice plants (21 – 23 cm) and different patterns of the Javanese calendar, used for calculating the most fertile days for planting and harvesting. Covering the ground, these blankets become the floor on which invited performers sit and have conversations during the LB03 opening about farming and food production in Pakistan. In its different iterations, Blanket Talks becomes an itinerant travel kit that transportstransport speakers and viewers to a pondok (hut in Bahasa Indonesia), reflecting on one’s relationship to food, and the people and ecology that produces them, as one gazes gently into the surrounding rice fields.

Mella Jaarsma (born Emmeloord, 1960) is an artist originally from the Netherlands and now residing in Yogyakarta, Indonesia. Mella Jaarsma has become known for her complex costume installations and her focus on forms of cultural and racial diversity embedded within clothing, the body, and food.