'Waters of the Abyss' at the Gardner makes alchemy with paper

Around her Brooklyn studio, Fabiola Jean-Louis is known as the “newspaper lady” by her neighbors. Paper is her medium of choice. To her, paper is sacred. With it, she interrogates Haitian liberation, Vodou, and opens portals to new worlds.

“ There is this element of being conscious of my environment and waste, always thinking about how I can take this everyday item, this paper that shape shifts unlike any other material in our world,” she said. “In one instance, it's paper, newspapers we don't care about or read and toss, or paper plates or money. Why not use it to world build?”

She worked for more than two years to create a massive series of 40 artworks on view at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. The exhibition, called “Waters of the Abyss: An Intersection of Spirit and Freedom,” is on display through the end of this month.

Visitors hear the ocean as they walk through the second floor gallery, the waves crashing and cresting followed by the sound of a conch. The sounds pay homage to the Haitian Revolution when enslaved people liberated themselves from French colonial rule. At the center of the gallery, a lwa stands at seven feet. Everything in this room is made of paper, tons of clay and newspaper molded together.

The lwa are “spirits of the spiritual realm, who serve as guides and sources of healing, knowledge, and resilience.” These traditions have roots in Haitian Vodou and other Afrocentric spiritual practices.

The towering figure's chest is a portal, its head crowned and face covered in a mask. The sculpture looks regal with a paper cape draped over its shoulders. In its hands, a machete.

“ I purposely did not make one specific lwa,” she said. “I made it to represent all of them, which is why her chest is open. She's also a portal… so there's access to all of them.”

Two mermaids stand nearby. Each one, at eight feet, is a kind of entrance into another dimension. They speak to “balance and chaos at the same time,” she said.

“ We can't talk about the water, we can't talk about movement of the human body, and we certainly can't talk about voodoo and ancestors living within the abyss of the water without bringing…the element of the fish into the space,” Jean-Louis said.

They are faceless with tails/torsos covered with hundreds of tiny sea shells the artist picked up all over the world, in Vietnam, in India, and in Haiti. Jean-Louis placed each shell by hand.

She crafted them into spirals of geometric shapes, forming a long tale. The work was tedious, meditative, and occasionally maddening.

“I had to work through, burst through other layers of patience that I didn't know I had,” she said. “I certainly was ready to test myself and I did with this project.”

Around the mermaids on the wall are other “entry points into Heaven” as she calls them, they are these miniature doorways made of papier-mâché, shells, crystals, glass, resin, and natural sea sponge.

They look like a miniature spiritual resting place with tiny stairways, fountains, and doorways.

The art is a take-over, spread throughout several galleries including one piece created for the entrance. The exhibition also includes two portraits of a personal journey, one of Jean-Louis and that of another woman.

“My work is always to connect spiritually with people,” she said. “I don't want to just make something that's beautiful… It's to have people engage with the work in a way that has them asking questions. Because my process requires extreme curiosity and bravery, and I want to inspire the same in the people that experience my work.”

“I want them to walk away feeling like they too are alchemists,” she said.

“Waters of the Abyss: An Intersection of Spirit and Freedom” is on display at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum through May 25.