- Venue
- The home of Judith Alder
- Location
- South East England
Curiouser and Curiouser
Review of Judith Alder retrospective – by Cathryn Kemp
“’Curiouser and curiouser!’ cried Alice (she was so much surprised, that for the moment she quite forgot how to speak good English)” Lewis Carroll’s Alice In Wonderland
Judith Alder’s pleasant suburban home may not be an obvious choice for a retrospective exhibition of this intensely interesting artist, but the sound of a tinny rendition of the song ‘No Place Like Home’ playing on a loop which was audible from her modest front door suggested all was not as it appeared.
Stepping into Alder’s house, which has been transformed into a curated Aladdin’s cave of works spanning 15 years of art production, was akin to entering another world – and yet one which was as familiar in its domestic setting as it was strange, filled to the brim with works, objects, books and musings.
Alder’s choice to show works within her environment seems a bold choice among the pretty paintings and ceramic offerings more usual to the Eastbourne Open Houses circuit, but somehow it works, and I’m not entirely sure how.
The artist herself, who was a Jerwood Drawing Prize nominee in 2012, works out of a studio in her back garden, which may explain the need to bring the viewer into her intimate, private realm. Or it may be that the context brings an extra layer of meaning, a private tension to the works, some of which are almost formal, using the language of the laboratory or collector.
Whatever her reasons, the experience of this exhibition starts at the threshold of Alder’s front door.
Every space, once inside, is made part of the whole with the hallway, stairwell, skirting boards and various rooms being the repository and container for sets of Alder’s works. Each room has its own character which invites a level of scrutiny which is thrilling in this split-second-memory-age.
There is no room here for a short attention span. Each piece, and there are hundreds of works, demands a consideration of its own place within the context of the whole alongside a private reckoning of its own.
The tune ‘No Place Like Home’ was being played from a vintage TV screen in the hallway, which Alder has requisitioned to contain a film piece made at The Redoubt Fortress during a residency in 2010.
Alder had drawn up a set of tiny curtains across a hole in the building used by pigeons to nest in. The song plays as the pigeons alternately return to the nest and fly off into the world. The piece is a neat starting point to discover the journeys Alder has been on, both by it talking of the space it sits in now and the gentle scrutiny Alder brings to her site-specific works.
Contrasting with the intimacy and warmth of pieces like ‘No Place Like Home’, Alder shows a series of abstract monotone paintings which suggest a rapid pulling back of her focus. Resembling military arial photographs, the paintings sit uncomfortably next to the intimacies of her collections and objects which range in silent dialogue in each of the rooms.
I feel that Alder is showing her processes by including these works, as this is not so much an exhibition but a kind of huge creative experiment in a laboratory of Alder’s own making and we are witnesses, and at times, collaborators in this experiment.
Ranged through the rooms are works including small artist books, branches with printed words, tiny hand-made origami boats which reference Alder’s photographic works, and alongside them a carefully curated selection of the books which influenced Alder’s process; storybooks, Enid Blyton, Rupert the bear, medical text books etc
As a viewer I felt I had to be careful to see everything in the rooms, not just the ‘obvious’ artworks, and so in doing so I became a co-creator of the experience, something akin to a treasure hunt with all the thrill of participation, being led on a journey with no real end.
My favourite space was The Discovery Room. This held the vintage cabinet stuffed with Alder’s notions of treasures and research which gives the exhibition its name.
The cabinet held casts of toy trolls, dried plants, moulds from peppers, stones, wrapped stones and objects which defied definition. Moving into the rest of the space, Alder invites viewers to go through her ‘sketch books’, slides, books and anything else as an act of exploration.
Her pads read like research manuals – working with the language of the lab as a scientific and medical exploration. It is here that Alder’s work feels most at home, if you pardon the pun.
The small, intimate and semi-dark back room became a womb-like place of safety to investigate in Alder’s footsteps. Her gentle touch is, again, part of everything. Tiny medical texts sit in patient wait to be noticed and referenced. Research books compiled by Alder make connections to objects within the cabinet, or the slide holders or to later works and bring much of Alder’s many concerns into a broader context.
The artist’s working methods are varied and yet remain intensely private. Alder’s artist statement tells us she has ‘an ongoing fascination with natural and un-natural growth, multiplication and evolution which inspire both wonder and awe.’ This study of the natural world and the curated world sit together, at times in harmony and at others, in disparity in this remarkable show.
She goes on to say that her works ‘are part of a bigger enquiry investigating our uneasy relationship with the world we live in, and our underlying fear of nature out of control.’
Alder realises this fear, this attempt at containment of the natural world with her endlessly patient gathering and storing of artefacts, seed pods, branches and also in her worked pieces where natural things are bound up tightly, changed, mutated and cast into plaster, like the medicalised world we inhabit.
It is testament to Alder’s shamanistic skill that this myriad of things, art objects, sounds and books sit as well together as they do.
Curiouser and Curiouser was open during Eastbourne Festival 2013 and upon request, by contacting Judith Alder on 01323 643677.
