- Venue
- Home
- Location
- South East England
The Von Heil Haus is the second in this series of events: SHOWFLAT, http://www.showflat.org, where artists were invited to take part through exhibiting in their own homes. SHOWFLAT challenges the relationship between public and private for both artist and viewer as the artist presents their work in a very personal space and invites an interested public. “The House is a succession of enclosures, a progressive withdrawal from the outside world, increasing in seclusion as the womb of the house is reached…. The house is convenient and self-centred. After generations have lived here behind closed doors…” Seamlessly clever, informed, infinitely considered, the Von Heil Haus presents a narrative of Adelheid Von Heil and her ancestry through which home, house, object, installation, and image provide the windows through which to peek. Biography, and a glimpse of autobiography present both intimacy and austerity, remote but ever-present. Fanciful, extravagant, extraordinary, irrational, absurd, nonsensical, implausible, improbable, unlikely, strange, peculiar, odd, queer, capricious, visionary, romantic: a fantastic notion?
Heidi Wigmore uses both real and imagined people to populate the Von Heil Haus. A very gracious host, she is the resonance of a personal and historical narrative, dressed in an elegant vintage velvet evening dress; the glitter of an exquisite brooch adorning the sleek line, the personification of the culmination and disintegration of a fictional family, a fictional history. Her visitors clasp a glass of wine, a tidbit, and there are private moments where the observer experiences a desire to covet or consume that the artefacts invoke. Over there, stands the height, the weight, of a figure waiting, eternally, to be unshrouded and renovated, an embodiment of the dominance of a family secluded, sequestered in history, behind closed doors.
In the conservatory, on the glass shelf, are a series of spoons, dipped in paint with the decadence of heavy whipped cream, these bear drawings of women, womanhood; spoons that have their domestic and functional use subsumed by the images on the paint that do not adorn but etch. These are less spoons, and more hand held looking glass, in the way they invite the viewer to pick up the object and gaze at a reflection not of a mirrored reality, but of a viewpoint, and there are many spoons, many viewpoints, a multifaceted perception of womanhood, not one answer but many questions. Gender, and its encumbent values, is always a pertinent question. The Bathroom: a place of privacy and aloneness. Ablution or absolution: a bucket, water or tears and hair. The sound of a woman humming, oblivious, an apparition, lace-like, a drawing: one face of many. Hair: cut plaits, skeins, ropes of hair are visited and revisited through the Von Heil House, a sensuous material taking on the form of binding, of crucifix, of adornment, sexuality, and loss.
The Gallery: the compendium of paintings; and with any collection of paintings being such a personal thing, there’s an insatiable curiosity in looking at what is a very informed and refined but nonetheless personal taste revealed, an unpicking, a restitution and correction of the subjects of the Old Masters. Victoriana: “Dark Tales For Little Children” traces some of Adelheids’ early roots, moving into the psychotherapeutic “Amnesia” phase, the exploration of the dynamic of mother and daughter, and this sequence of images iterates both the universal and the autobiographical. Hard hitting, ironic and iconic. Desirable objects: from a time of musicality being a skill, a talent, a commodity desirable to a female of marraigeability, now shrouded, an improbable musical instrument from the harpsichord family (which incidentally also includes the virginal and the spinet) and one gets the feeling it’s not possible for this piece to be restored. A priceless Paleolithic venus figurine, untouchable in her glass dome (duly labelled and catalogued, as in all stately homes now so difficult to maintain) silent and oblivious to all she surveys. And so end Adelheids’ early days.
Through to the Dressing Room: dummies (emotional crash test), the mute female, idol, icon of standardisation, of conformation of the female form. There’s a forensic feel, the visual linking together of numbered objects and images, the placing or arrangement of the toiletries, the vanity or vanitas enveloped in dust and delicate cobwebs. This may be about whether object and image visually link but becomes a metaphor for piecing together past events, like a shattered piece of wedding china, wondering if all the pieces are there. It’s frustrating when that happens: how could those pieces fit together again, and is it possible that other pieces, other events, other lives and memories have got mixed up in those pieces. It’s broken, and there’s a factual impassiveness.
In the hearth of the Drawing Room a moving visual record of a woman as she washes her hair. She cuts off the plaits, the tentative grasp of hands working behind the head, tailor’s scissors: cut to fit. The monochrome imagery highlights the textures of hair, skin, metal, water, and the grace and dignity in this private and poignant act, a turning point in Adelheids’ account, moving from Germany to England. A portrait of Adelheid, turned away, her hair bound, exposing the nape of her neck. The Drawing Room is littered with objects: a feathered headpiece, a mirror, an unstandard lamp, the mahogany mounted horns of a Stag with the trophy of a skein of that blond hair. The books in the bookcase have their spines turned inwards: the blindness of the contents both exposed and closed, many volumes tightly pushed together; anonymity, apart from the book entitled ‘Heidi’. There’s a knowingness of the power of objects here.
Part of a new culture of bypassing the gallery system, and opening a new way forward, Wigmore has integrated within this context her multimedia practice, encompassing site specific installation, intervention, drawing, sculpture, sound and video installation. Publications extend to the viewer the depth of strands and journeys (Wigmore is also very widely traveled) within her practice. I was very interested in Heidi’s proposition and construction of a contemporary fictional figure and the narrative of an ancestral fictional family within the space of a home that dramatically changed in personality from a domestic environment to a monolith of how the past and facing the future shapes us as individuals.
The ‘notion of the fantastic’ isn’t far-fetched: the experience of the occasion, the reaction of guests, the installation of a series of rooms and spaces had an unerring effect to surprise, to reset and reorder perception. The images on the walls took much time to pore over – the quality of image-making, brought a sensuously tactile richness, and a vast visual range to the event, as much as the emotional cadence: recapitulation of stances within the personal strands of historicity and identity, gender, cultural and social norms. There’s also a redefining of history: history of objects and images and their accepted meanings; the history remaining of the fragments of lives; a personal history as narrative fact or fictional construct, an interplay of biography and autobiography.
Wigmore is playful with iconic images from the Grand History of Art, to expose meaning in a contemporary context and impose new meaning: an agility in understanding and subverting the purpose of artworks, to create a new meaning and purpose within the context of the installation. In terms of presentation, Wigmore talks about the ‘aesthetic of dusty provincial museums’, the presentation of collections, the outdated and faded information, the irrelevant catalogue information listed with it, the languishing of unrenovated, unreconciled objects; and the notion of collections, in which in the presence of each item points to the ‘conspicuous absences made physical’: the idea of it being about what’s not there as much as what is there, brings loss and longing. In the face that sadness, there is more to celebrate: there are dark, dry, maybe wistful glimpses of humour within the images (the portrait of Baron Von Heidster, a retouched found archival photograph, in which he sports lovely long Germanic plaits and a spot of color to liven the face); a dry twist with objects. Wigmore, first and foremost, and last but not least, has beautiful draughtsmanship interlinking the range of media used to create this Showflat. It’s a very powerful thing to be able to create beauty, and the kind of beauty that has grace, strength, poignance, dignity, sadness, a precious delicacy and brutality to expose a new and fantastic reality.
