Every Thread That Binds You
Inverting the renowned Jewish exorcism story of The Dybbuk, painted and sculpted figures stitch protective layers onto their own skin.
Multidisciplinary artist Jess Riva Cooper has a long-held interest in mystical characters of Jewish folklore. The notion of the evil spirit of the Dybbuk which enters a living person intertwines with Cooper’s ongoing exploration of parasitic, invading plant life. Noted writer and ethnographer S. An-ski (1863–1920) popularized the lore of the malevolent spirit in the renowned early 20th-century Yiddish play: Der dibek: Tsvishn tsvey veltn (“The Dybbuk: Between Two Worlds”). The story centres on Leah – possessed on her wedding day by the tortured, wronged soul of her true beloved, Khonen, who died suddenly upon learning of her impending matrimony to another.
In this exhibition, the artist interprets the famed fantastical tale through a woman’s view, considering how Leah does not possess control over her destiny within a devout, patriarchal world order. The exhibition title is extracted from a climactic moment in the script; the Rabbi commands the Dybbuk to sever “every thread that binds you to the living world and to the body and soul of the maiden.” The world An-ski describes demands separation; cutting from the unknown. Integrating large-scale drawings and ceramic sculptures, Cooper takes up the metaphor of connective threads in a generative way. She transforms women’s idealized domestic work of sewing and mending into an otherworldly gesture equal to An-ski’s drama. Sewers stitch protective garments onto their clothing and even their own skin, attaching to themselves benevolent shadow-beings that only appear foreboding. Here the act of creation is one of salvation, returning power to the hands of women.
Evelyn Tauben
Biography:
Jess Riva Cooper is a Toronto-based artist and educator whose work integrates clay, drawing, colour, and various materials to create intricate sculptures and installation-based artworks. Her pieces often explore themes of mythology, nature, and transformation, blending human and botanical imagery in ways that evoke vulnerability and resilience. In her sculptures, nature reclaims space, with plant forms sprouting, creeping over structures, and creating preternatural transformations that subvert order and invite chaos.
Cooper holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design (NSCAD) and a Master of Fine Arts in Ceramics from the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD). Her artistic practice is shaped by residencies at Medalta, The Archie Bray Foundation, and the Kohler Arts/Industry Program, among others.
Her work has been exhibited widely across North America and internationally, including at the Gardiner Museum in Toronto and the Cynthia Corbett Gallery in London. Through her sculptures, Cooper addresses ecological concerns and cultural storytelling, encouraging reflection on the interconnectedness of life, decay, and renewal.
Artist Statement:
I create artwork reflecting on invasive species, the parasitic, multiplying growth that exists on the borders of civilization. As the grandchild of Holocaust survivors, I uncover ancestral tales and histories that were nearly eradicated. I draw upon the myths of Dybbuk spirits in Yiddish folklore, reinterpreting these traditional stories of spirit possession and dislocation through a feminist lens. My investigation of malevolent Dybbuk spirits that take over the human body parallels my interest in insidious plant life. In each case, the parasitic entity subsumes the host. In this way, my work incorporates both death and regeneration.
As a maker, I work in an invasive, even parasitic way, using fired pieces and scavenged remnants of older sculptures. These disparate pieces are catalogued into containers based on size and type, creating a museum of multiples I draw from during my making process. I also create multiples of larger cast and press-moulded busts and limbs, keeping them in their softened state. These intrusive pieces pierce the soft clay skin of my figures and installations, building upon fired surfaces. The finished result captures the human body in stillness, frozen in a static moment of tension, struggle, and the reclamation process that intersects humans, objects, and nature. Ceramic busts and sculptures, once pure and pristine, become hardly recognizable, overgrown with plant life. Their heads grow leaves instead of hair, and their skin is punctured with fruiting vines. Faces scream in pain or pleasure in the midst of transformation.
For my recent solo show, Pullulate, large clay plaques were created that are mashups of ceramic tropes and styles, cultivating a genteel, little-shop-of-horrors. My work comments on humans’ often oppositional relationships with nature. As humans pressure the planet, what happens when the environment pushes back? When decay precipitates regrowth in new and unexpected spaces? Will we, responsible for the climate crisis, unintentionally create a hybridization of flora and fauna as imagined in my sculptures?