critical reflection
I consider my work to be born directly out of the process of making; the making is not a means to an end. My practice currently has a strong focus on object-making and strives for a sense of rigor in materials – a reflection of an ongoing negotiation between me and them. Here I have selected a few of the artists whose approach to making and/or materials resonates with mine.
The work I make is often identified as having uncanny qualities – interacting aspects of both the familiar and unfamiliar within the material/form relationship. The artist I most associate with this is Louise Bourgeois, whose work – although connected to both – does not fit comfortably in the categories of either surrealist or abject art. Her works that incorporate textile often play with surface and form, body and skin. Objects that look like garments can have solidity or independent form or mass, like Untitled (1996).
Louise Bourgeois, Untitled, 1996. © The Easton Foundation/VAGA at ARS, NY and DACS, London 2021. Photo: Allan Finkelman
Bourgeois used her own clothing in her making – fabrics showing signs of wear and use, and that have an autobiographical quality. The textiles I work with are usually repurposed from old projects or salvaged from my home and, as such, bear the marks and wear of their previous use(s). Untitled (2024) uses pink felt recovered from a 2020 project – flecked with spots of paint, and both human and pet hair that have stubbornly worked their way into the fibres. In this sense they have an autobiographical reference to their own histories as material.
Untitled (2024)
Felt detail
In contrast to this, Heidi Bucher would generate entirely new material in her ‘skinnings’ – latex-soaked gauze moulds of entire rooms. But they also take something of what they are moulding with them: dust, flecks of paint. To me there is an element of the abject in the material – it reminds me of flesh that has been wiped with iodine before surgery or the skin of ancient mummified corpses. It is interesting, then, to see it in such an architectural form that might otherwise be, at the least, neutral – if not actively sterile; a painted wall or varnished wood with none of the warmth and tactility of flesh is transformed into an almost alive, bodily material. Bucher had previously worked in a different kind of textile-adjacency, making wearable foam and vinyl sculptures. This enquiry into the connection between skin and clothing, and negative space and body, is one that is central to my own work.
Hautraum , 1987 Latex, gaze, bamboo construction, wire. 350 x 500 x 500 cm. Sammlung Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst Photo: Stefan Altenburger Photography, Zurich, 2015
Heidi Bucher during the skinning process of Herrenzimmer (Gentlemen's Study) 1977-79. The Estate of Heidi Bucher: Photo Hans Peter Siffert
This interaction between austere form and evocative surface seen in works like Hautrum is also central to the work of Eva Hesse – a post-minimalist pioneer whose sculptures simultaneously ‘apply and subvert the formal codes of minimalist sculpture’ (Schwartz, 2019). Much like Bourgeois, Hesse came from a background in textile design and again this permeates her relationship with material – there is a strong consideration for tactility and for flatness taking on soft shape.
Hesse used nontraditional materials: chicken wire, latex, rubber – all with aspects of softness, malleability, viscosity – to make forms that are unplaceable, enigmatic but human, familiar but unsettling. Summarised in her word for them: ucky.
Eva Hesse, Contingent. 1969. Cheesecloth, latex, fiberglass. 8 units, dimensions variable. National Gallery of Australia, Canberra.
Her concern for process over outcome is further demonstrated in the works ephemerality. Within her short lifetime the works were already beginning to degrade; she expressed guilt over the idea of collectors buying work that wouldn’t last – but ultimately made a considered decision to place her material choices over the permanence of the artwork (Danto, 2006).
Although the materials of my work are not prone to degradation, the knowledge that I will almost certainly reuse them in the future causes me to view the object or the installation in the same way - none so much as Bedwork (2024) which could never outlast my need to use my bed for its intended purpose. I do not see the work I make as permanent – it is just an iteration, often just one incarnation of an ongoing process.
Bedwork (2024)
This kind of irreverent view of one’s artworks is something that interested me in Lygia Clark’s practice. A multimedia artist who worked often with participatory experience, her sculptural work ‘increasingly prioritised embodied experience over the symbolic status of the object’ (Whitechapel Gallery, 2024).
Clark made a series of sculptures consisting of geometrical metal parts joined by hinges – she termed them ‘relational objects’. I was able to see some of these: replicated Bichos (which translates to ‘critters’) at Lygia Clark: The I and the You at Whitechapel Gallery. Viewers are invited to pick them up and reconfigure them. I was interested not just in the participatory aspect – the changeability of the forms, the impact this had on the ‘white cube’ atmosphere – but also the physical marks left behind by this process: dark scratches from the metal being moved on the white plinths. These marks acted as a record of every interaction between the viewer and the object – the plinth becoming part of the artwork.
Lygia Clark, Bicho. 1960. Aluminum. Variable dimensions
Detail: Bicho and plinth
I want the art I make to be touched, felt and (if the work has a perceived function) used however the viewer sees fit. Both the interaction itself and the evidence of the interaction – wear and tear, marks, distortion – are all a continuation of the process of its creation. What the passage of time has done to Hesse’s work, hands and bodies might do to mine (ultimately, it’s often my own hands taking the work apart to salvage its materials).
Moving forward my practice, I am interested in developing some larger-scale, industrial armatures for fabric. I am looking to play more with the idea of function and dynamic work – leaning into the tactility and perhaps creating moveable or changeable elements. I like the blurring of the lines between garment/architectural space/furniture. This seems like it could open itself up into more installation-based work and intervention in spaces, drawing from multiple lines of enquiry into form, surface, material and interaction with the body.
Cusk, R. (2022) ‘The Fabricated Woman’, in Louise Bourgeois: The Woven Child. London: Hayward Gallery, pp. 27–31.
Danto, A. (2006). "All About Eva". The Nation. 17 (24): 32.
Schwartz, G. (2019) ‘Eva Hesse’, in Great Women Artists. London: Phaidon, p. 185.
‘Lygia Clark: The I and the You’ (2024) Press Release: Lygia Clark, The I and You [Preprint]. Available at: https://www.whitechapelgallery.org/about/press/lygia-clark-the-i-and-the-you/ (Accessed: 02 January 2025).
https://www.moma.org/collection/works/81930
https://www.theapproach.co.uk/artists/heidi-bucher
https://www.whitechapelgallery.org/about/press/lygia-clark-the-i-and-the-you/