Business Finance Media Technology Policy Wealth Insights Interviews

Art Art Fairs Art Market Art Reviews Auctions Galleries Museums Interviews

Lifestyle Nightlife & Dining Style Travel Interviews

Power Lists Nightlife & Dining Art A.I. PR

About About Observer Advertise With Us Reprints

Jewel’s First Major Exhibition Merges Science, Myth and Feminine Power

Drawing on scientific data, personal history and inherited legends, “Matriclysm: An Archaeology of Connections Lost” asks what a culture loses when it forgets how to relate not only to nature but also to its own shared memories and identity.

Jewel is best known for her music, but the Alaskan singer-songwriter grew up surrounded by art. Her mother was a glass artist, and Jewel herself began making art at 15. In conversation with Observer, the artist, who has synaesthesia—a neurological condition that causes her to see fractals and associate color with sound—explains that “they go together. I wouldn’t know how to separate them.” Her debut exhibition “Matriclysm: An Archaeology of Connections Lost” at Salone Verde in Venice brings these worlds together through painting, sound installation, sculpture, textiles and glass.

Sign Up For Our Daily Newsletter

Thank you for signing up!

By clicking submit, you agree to our terms of service and acknowledge we may use your information to send you emails, product samples, and promotions on this website and other properties. You can opt out anytime.

The show begins with First Mother, which sits outside the entrance. Sculpted in collaboration with Congolese artist Patrick Bongoy, the work references Mitochondrial Eve, the woman from whom the mitochondrial DNA of all living humans can be traced. Made from hessian thread and exposed to the elements, First Mother is intended to disintegrate, inviting contemplation of inevitable natural decay and impermanence. Visitors are encouraged to touch the work, setting the tone for what follows: an exhibition grounded in slow engagement, close listening and embodied experience.

Throughout, Jewel deftly grapples with complicated and often traumatic histories alongside larger scientific and natural phenomena. At its center is a palpable feminine energy, or what Jewel describes as portals into the “undiluted feminine power”: generative, embodied, relational and entirely itself. Rather than treating memory as something fixed, Matriclysm understands it as something living—woven through bodies, motherhood, ancestry, nature and the connections we inherit and inevitably lose. What follows is our talk, lightly edited.

Tell me about the exhibition title and the word “Matriclysm.”

“Matriclysm” is a neologism. I made up the word by combining matriarch and cataclysm. For me, it names the largely unrecorded catastrophe of losing feminine memory and our capacities for connection, while asking what still might be recovered. Feminine memory is the knowledge that’s carried through bodies, rituals, stories and relationships that often history fails to record.

The exhibition started with the question of what happens when a culture loses its connective capacities: to itself, to one another, and to the natural world. I really wanted to create an archaeology of those types of losses,........

© Observer