- Venue
- Winchester Discovery Centre
- Location
- South East England
The object in question is a plain white robe made from a cotton duvet. It’s a garment – suspended mid-air on its ordinary wooden hanger – that simultaneously evokes the public presence of an intimate interior space, and wholly shuts off our access to it. The object turns out to be the body-as-subject.
This beautiful, extraordinary exhibition is the occasion for other artists to show us how they have responded to, argued with, skirted round, the Asentamiento Dress, designed and made by textile artist Julie Cook, as the muse for their own work. Between them they offer us a drawing (Susie MacMurray), a poem (Colette Bryce), a photograph (David Birkin), a mantilla (Arabel Lebrusan), six ceramic vessels (Tamsin van Essen) and soft furnishings (Dunne and Raby with Michael Anastassiades).
The gallery, with its blonde wood floor, white walls and subdued natural light, is a place of meditation, its generous oblong dimensions giving plenty of room for the exhibits to be viewed individually and in multiplying relationship to each other.
The Asentamiento Dress is one piece in Cook’s series Duende: a time for healing: flamenco being the lingua franca in which the healing process is expressed or shrouded. Part of the charm (appeal, spell) of Asentamiento Dress are the instructions – incantations – for wear, which reveal that these textile artefacts are in fact medicaments with curative properties for body and soul, provided they are enacted correctly:
‘An introspection dress tied at the neck with a weighted base to reduce flight and maintain stillness. Provides economy of movement through gravity forces, reducing distressing anxiety and turmoil. Containment is provided as the feathers settle to a place of peace.
1. Lift over the head and secure the neck with the knotted string.
2. Take up the secret arm position.
3. To reset the body, apply the internal silk poultice to the solar plexus.
4. Allow catharsis to take place and lift the skirt when you want to dance.’
A filmed version of Duende is on a loop as part of the exhibition. The film is viewable at: http://www.julie-cook.com/duende.html Several of the textiles, together with their quasi-instructions, also appear on http://www.axisweb.org/
The intrinsic surrealism of femininity, of the embodied female, is part of the conversation that the dress wants to have with us; Frida Kahlo, Meret Oppenheim and Remedios Varo are within earshot. Two of the artists – Lebrusan and van Essen – are eloquent on the matter. Lebrusan’s Mantilla is an intricate, delicate piece which the visitor will probably first encounter in a striking photograph, where it is worn like a veil over the head of a model whose face it conceals and reveals. In reality, lying full-length in its glass case under the photograph, it’s an eerily powerful, iintransigent object – we immediately sense the weight and stiffness of the cast silver and pearls that must be worn by the woman, the freight of the apprenticeship that has been served. Throughout its imposing length, the repeated filigree motifs of birds and crucifixes, bells and bulls, high-heeled boots and dancing cats, betoken obsessions and fantasies that are cultural as much as personal. It has the look of a punishment, a penitence, as well as of a fabulously expensive adornment: the cost of beauty.
Van Essen develops the interior-exterior dialectic, the call-and-response between the hidden and the superficial, with a group of ceramics, Medical Heirlooms. These have titles like Scars, Acne, Healing. Their exteriors are high-gloss and off-white, with pocks and eruptions (the Acne pieces), outsize staples (Scars–Suture) and a bas-relief gauze bandage (Healing). The interiors have to be peered into from different angles, voyeuristically almost: they’ve grown polyps, cysts, fibroids, scar tissue. But under our sustained gaze, they become willed characteristics about which to be inquisitive and appreciative, rather than accidental blemishes to be glimpsed or furtively glanced at.
Bryce writes of her poem that to begin with she ‘was working in the dark as to who was speaking’ – an observation that fortuitously applies to most of the work in the exhibition, and another clue that the big mystery here is the body. The poem is reproduced as if typed with a manual typewriter: the wonky typeface with its blurred-black font and prominent serifs remind us of the physical effort, the motor skills, implicated in writing. I stepped up really close to look at the pinprickss that her commas and stops must surely have punched in the paper. There were none – a neat trick! The words take on their corporeality when you stand and listen to the recording of Bryce reading this poem of metamorphosis – the dress as chrysalis – in her husky Ulster voice with a hint of something like irony in its lilt. One or two unfamiliar words (pupation, ecdysis) remind us discreetly that the process is not to be taken for granted – transparency, what you see is what you get, is not the guiding principle here. Rites, not rights; though clearly there have been wrongs.
MacMurray (in Gauze Bandage) and Birkin (in Untitled, from the series Confessions) give us graphical and photographic works of subtle somatic exploration and evocation – apparently naturalistic or documentary but actually fully metaphorical in the same way as the Duende sequence. For me, the least successful – because overly conceptual (you had to read the explanation to know what they were and were for) – pieces were the Huggable Atomic Mushrooms by Dunne, Raby and Anastassiades. But they are very popular with other visitors, to judge by the notes posted on the comments board.
From what many of the artists write about the impetus for their work, one might believe the exhibition is about trauma and catharsis, injury and therapy, showing and telling, the transforming power of the creative act. ‘Painstaking’ is a word MacMurray uses – taking pains, and doing something else with them. Something was telling me that this can’t have been the whole truth, however: as I left, I realised that there had been no blood. Nothing resembling liquids poured out, out of place, haemorrhagic.
What we seem to have here are the rituals, the apparatus, the relics and precious traces, of profound phenomenological (not physical nor psychological) processes. Someone, some consciousness, has been a witness to something like a series of initiations, rites of passage, but we are left wondering who or what has passed: through, on or away. The wonderment is what stays.
Practical information:
The exhibition:
The exhibition is a Crafts Council Touring Exhibition. For information about hiring it, contact: Charlotte Dew, Exhibitions Project Officer, Crafts Council
Tel: +44 (0)207 806 2515?
Email: [email protected]
The Venue:
Winchester is the launch venue for this exhibition:
Winchester Discovery Centre, Jewry Street, Winchester, Hampshire SO23 8RX
Tel: +44 (0)845 603 5631
The Centre is open every day. Visit:
http://www3.hants.gov.uk/wdc/wdc-gallery.htm and: http://www3.hants.gov.uk/communications/mediacentre/mediarelease
for times, associated activities and pictures.
