Jesse English
Kinetic Artist
Brincadores
This is a condensed version of the film, Brincadores.
It is a twenty minute film, shortened here to ten. Brincadores
means jumping beans. They are larva inside what looks like a been.
These amazing little things bounce around, and I saw them as a child in Mexico.
I still think about those captivating beans today. I used this
concept to develop jumping creatures that travel through the landscape.
They come together and form a new and equally remarkable form; a giant
Brincador-worm.
The jars in the film and sculptural project were found in a farmhouse that was abandoned in the sixties, in the Delta region on the boarder of Arkansas and Tennessee. The home, shown at the bottom of this page, (more fully in the film above) was dilapidated; and I had mistaken it for a barn, even on the inside, until I noticed remnants of a bed, refrigerator, cloths, and so on. The bed was only springs. For a time I pondered why so many jars; there were several hundred. I tried to determine what people lived here. Did children live here? There were no toys.
The jars continued to draw my attention. They had been falling into broken piles from rotten holes in the wood-plank ceiling. I could not lift myself to see in these holes because the wood would have given way. I lifted my tripod-connected video camera in the hole. I would look at the footage later. I collected jars for a project that was at that point undetermined.
The lines of jars represent strength/spine, bartering, falling from ceiling/deterioration. On the right is a cotton video screen where images of the Delta region were projected. In a show I entitled Jump Up Look Down, cotton cubes were used as seating while viewing films on this 5x8 screen. The screen, and some of my landscapes (which look like this screen) were inspired by satellite imagery of the Delta region.
After viewing the footage, and saw the hundreds more jars that were still above, I began to understand. At that time, lives revolved around canning and preserving crops. As I continued contemplating those lives, that place, that time, I began to see there economy more clear. This family didn’t have nor need currency as you and I know it. Food was funds. The children, which there were likely many, were not the type that would have toys. They were workers, farmers, canners. As I discussed what I was learning with ‘maturing’ people of the area, I heard many stories about childhood farmers before farm mechanization. While living in this area, I developed a series of artworks dealing with my responses to what I was learning, and the Delta land.