Heartfelt Lifeline in the Rain Forest

By Catherine Fox, THE ATLANTA JOURNAL-CONSTITUTION

Jacqueline Bishop’s “Panorama,” which snakes on the walls of the Georgia State University art gallery, is a flotsam of baby shoes, artificial birds and toys, all bathed in black.

Closer inspection of the 40-foot-long assemblage reveals a wealth of detail. Bright and tiny images of birds, orchids and jellyfish on the surface. Dried pods, insect hives and birds’ nests tucked into and around the shoes. String hanging down like vines.

All the flora and fauna in this piece are found in Brazil. For 12 years, the New Orleans artist has explored and studied the Central and South American rain forests and expressed her feelings and fears for this endangered habitat in her jewellike paintings. A few years ago, she began to make paintings on baby shoes — an apt symbol of innocence and vulnerability.

Both stunning and provocative, “Panorama” is open to multiple readings. To my mind, the tar-black color suggests a post-Exxon Valdez, river. Given the connotations of the baby shoes, the title might as easily been “The Massacre of the Innocents.”

The artist envisions it as an aerial view of a landscape that is unraveling. The undulant shape is embedded with associations.

“This line is everywhere in the igapo, or flooded forest, the jungle,” the artist explains in an e-mail. “In bird flight patterns, butterfly flight patterns, liana vine in the jungle, or winding riverbank edge from my canoe.”

And though she began the piece in 2004, it conjures visions of Katrina’s wrath. “It is uncanny,” Bishop writes, “that now this line covers New Orleans, the waterline from the flood.”