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Jacci Den Hartog: Blood and Bones
essay by Meg Linton
Writer, curator, and Chief Executive Officer
for the Newport Beach Public Library Foundation

Like an ancient Song Dynasty scholar/artist/garden-designer, Jacci Den Hartog, aims to invite the blood and bones of the earth into her studio by studying the landscape around her and bringing in those essential elements she finds compelling to study, interpret, and portray—in this case, rock and water. Usually seen as opposing matter, Den Hartog’s sculpted and painted boulders and waterfalls exist in a codependent, gravity-defying relationship. One would not be without the other. The yin-yang embrace of her standing rivers and stones are exaggerated and question the reality they are spawned from while simultaneously evoking the truth, tension, and inevitability of natural forces—eruption, erosion, growth, and decay.

An avid scholar of Chinese gardens and rock formations, Den Hartog has seemingly adapted the three formal aspects to be aimed for when building false mountains in an artificially designed landscape: t’ou, shou, and lou. 1 Her waterfall/boulder structures offer physical and symbolic passageways; they are precarious and vulnerable with their small and tenuous footings on the slick steel bases; and their fluid iridescence hints at transparency and emits a ‘hardly-there’ quality. The elongated, thin, strenuous, blue/green limbs of the water have a feminine delicacy as they lift, support, and skirt around the bulbous weighty masses as if they are dancers balancing en pointe—a sensibility admired in Chinese scholar stones. Finally, her sculptures almost weep, leak or drip, forming openings presented to all sides for us to contemplate what is either present or absent from these animated formations. More often than not, in Den Hartog’s work what is depicted or seen is equally as important as what is void or left unsaid so the viewer’s imagination may be ignited while surveying these expressive three-dimensional painted gestures.

The Danish-Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson has said, “Once you know the size of the waterfall, you know the size of your body. This is where it gets interesting. It’s not so much about the mountain, landscape, and the nature. It’s about us.” 2 Den Hartog’s renderings of these places she has visited—Nojoqui Falls, Millard Canyon Falls, Eaton Canyon Falls, Pheiffer Falls-Big Sur, Holy Jim Falls—are about her, us, and our place in this world. She has miniaturized the falls to a human, conversational scale. We stand with these vertical sculptures not above or below, but next to them as if they are other living bodies in the room to explore. We are able to circle the stilled, silent waterfalls and read them from multiple angles, which is not often possible in our local county and state parks, unless one takes the “tongue-n-cheek” Jungle Cruise ride at Disneyland, and gets to see “the backside of water” as the boat passes under Schweitzer Falls. With Den Hartog’s Giacometti-esque, contorted, cantilevered constructions she changes our position from a single proprietary sight line to an all-encompassing artificial, yet authentic, interpretation of a natural phenomenon.

Complimenting and contrasting her static falls, Den Hartog has sculpted a series of smaller rock forms with rich literary or mythic titles like “Eurydice Swept Back,” “Cyclops,” “Evil Spirit,” and “Burial at Sea.” These intimate objects made for pedestals or to hang on the wall, feel more akin to scholar rocks with their sensuous surfaces and inviting caverns and crevices. In these macro snippets of simulated stone deceptively formed by geologic or hydraulic processes, Den Hartog focuses in on the tight, squeeze-through passages of pressurized matter to lead her viewer’s eye into the underworld where water drips, seeps, and runs off in to timeless atmosphere. These sculptures depict the forensic traces of liquid over stone when it disappears from humankind’s reach and enters the subconscious world of Hades and Persephone. Places where imagination may wander freely and inspire the artist to meander us into a realm of poetics where water and boulders dance and whisper under the earth and sky. Places where Den Hartog, like the ancients she studies, may magically capture the living spirit of nature itself by sharing her composite portraits of Gaia’s flesh and blood.