This Is the House That Jan Built (2025)

If you’ve come upon Jan McCullough’s Jigs and wondered what you are looking at, know that you’re not alone. As physical objects, jigs rarely figure in our daily lives. I was completely unfamiliar even with the term itself prior to seeing Jan’s latest project. It’s no surprise that I felt out of my element when viewing her photographs, because my brain is not trained to comprehend jigs in terms of their use, function, elegance, ingenuity or impromptu nature. As the jigs refused my unskilled attempts to decipher them as guiding tools, my curatorial eye resorted to considering their portraits as aesthetic objects. This diversion suggested itself so readily because the photographs are presented within the field of Jan’s artistic practice and the larger cultural environment that supports her work. By removing the jigs from their original habitat and planting them in her world, one could say that McCullough has set up the viewer for failure. Our all too human minds, trained to identify and assess our environments, demand an object to focus on, a subject to comprehend, or a starting point for further investigation. So, what can the viewer make of these curious wooden structures—sculptural but seemingly functional—wedged between artistic abstraction and industrial application? Let’s unpack the riddle that is Jigs and see where it leads to.

Before starting, I should add that there is nothing that prohibits one from just savoring the formal beauty of these compositions, the consistent use of color and lighting, or contemplating the references to constructivist architecture or post-modern sculpture — depending on ones preferences. However, that would mean missing out on the brightness of the mind at play in this artwork, McCullough’s mind in this case.

In Ireland, the burgeoning film industry has quietly provided financial stability for artists like Jan and her peers, enabling them to sustain their creative practices by employing them as set designers and builders, still photographers, and sound technicians. In this capacity, McCullough discovered a largely unspoken, highly specialized construction vocabulary in East Belfast’s scenic workshops which need to prioritize optics over structural integrity. Set builders develop techniques based on experience and urgency, whether it’s creating spaces and surface textures from hastily taken snapshots, building modular and easily adjustable sets that fit in the backs of vans, or simply remembering that the camera, not the human eye, is doing the recording, which comes with its own set of requirements. McCullough became particularly interested in the small, custom-built tools used by carpenters, known as jigs, which serve as guiding mechanisms for cutting, assembling or securing scenic architectural elements. Though they appear to be improvised assemblages of scrap wood and hardware, each jig encodes a logic of use that is often only clear to its maker — even other skilled carpenters may struggle to understand them at a glance. In the workshop, these support mechanisms circulate as part of an embodied knowledge system, facilitating efficiency while keeping themselves quietly at hand in the background.

In both set building and photography, labour is an invisible force—crucial yet deliberately hidden in the final product. The work of the scenic carpenter disappears into the illusion of a set, just as the labour behind a photograph is often obscured by the immediacy of the image. Artistry, in both cases, resides not only in what is visible, but in the ability to create a cast, as it were, of what remains forever intangible: human imagination. McCullough must have realized that the photographer and the set builders, in their respective practices, are solving a similar problem: how to materialize something as highly private as an artistic vision in a way that can be clearly perceived, shared and talked about, becoming something we can hold in common. I like to think of the intangible force of imagination that drives and informs both disciplines as ‘negative space’.

As a photographic term, negative space often denotes a compositional element that depicts a subject by showing everything around the subject rather than the subject itself. Negative space can be understood as analogous to active silence in music, or a purposeful pause in a speech. In Japanese culture, the word ‘ma’ can refer to negative space as the essence of something: the essence of a house is not the walls and doors that you see, but the space it encloses. Throughout her career, McCullough has shown a sustained interested in the variety of material practices by which humans articulate their uniquely private visions. Whether this happens in an early work like Vision Board Parties (2018), in Tricks of the Trade (2020) or more recently in Night Class (2023-2024), “a series of sculptural interventions and photographs that make visible alternative forms of labour and knowledge.” In all these instances, she is showing the viewer the walls, doors and windows of the space that houses creative imagination, but only in order to point to its essence. A fascination with the mysteries and secrets of artistic vision and how it is birthed into the world are what lie at the heart of McCullough’s practice.

That makes a work like Jigs more than “temporary monuments to the inventive nature and evocative gestures of this usually invisible labour” of the scenic construction workers, as the artist puts it herself. Just as a jig allows construction without becoming part of the final structure, McCullough’s photographs function as the support structure and measuring guide by which imagination can manifest itself as an invisible force in our lives. And in the house that Jan built, there is room for everyone.

- Hester Keijser

Published in Source Photographic Review #118 (Spring 2025)