critical reflection
Introduction
My practice centres around first gathering materials and in turn responding to them with object-making. I primarily work with fabric, most recently domestic items like old towels, bedsheets and blankets. I make stuffed, soft sculptures that attempt to balance incongruous elements: hybrid forms that confuse perceptions of use.
Below I will outline some selected artists’ works that are connected in some way to my own. I will also discuss ideas about material and the visual language of function, such as they apply to my current practice and my considerations of future works. Finally, I will consider what the near future of my practice might look like, particularly in relation to the upcoming MA Summer Show.
John Summers
In a 2012 installation for The Zabludowicz Collection, John Summers covered the gallery floor in hay and placed a series of three faux-fur covered structures throughout the room. “Summers seemed to be taking on sculpture’s ongoing dialectic; the brashness of the monumental or the sensitivity of the intimate”, wrote artist Fiona McDonald (2012).
The “tactile friendliness” of the fluffy fabric sits in stark contrast to the frames underneath. They exist somewhere between a minimalist Sol LeWhitt sculpture and a piece of scaffolding. Any solemnity or utilitarian associations are then diffused by a skin of baby blue softness. Summers himself, with young children at the time, “acknowledged the influence of films like Monsters Inc.”. The decision to glue the fabric to the frames rather than sewing or upholstering, adds to the feeling that we are looking at a child’s craft project, enlarged by a factor of one hundred.
John Summers, Untitled (2012) Fake fur, wood, tin foil, toilet paper, hay, PVA, carpet underlay, LEE filters. Dimensions unlisted. Zabludowicz Collection. Photo: Tim Bowditch.
What interests me here are the contrasts: hard-soft, rigid-loose, functional-absurd, industrial-childlike. The work finds an equilibrium inside these different directional pulls. These opposing forces are something I explore in my own work: in simple terms, using old domestic fabrics to make seemingly purpose-built, usable objects. Forms that feel familiar, maybe even safe, but that gently resist clarity.
Olivia Bax
When I was eight years old, an art teacher gave my class balls of clay and instructed us to squeeze them in one hand until they took on the shape of the inside of our fists. Then, into our oddly shaped lump, we were told to poke holes, dig out tunnels, carve out tiny steps, add on whatever features we liked. The resulting objects, when dry, would be a playground for ants. We should put them outside and (who knows?) maybe some critters would come to play.
Recreation of ant playground exercise
Olivia Bax’s Roost triggered this particular memory. The work stands over two meters tall in the form of some kind of hybridised animal playground and, as writer/curator Jon Wood (2022) suggests, a “Heath Robinson… Dadaist biological machine”. He describes Bax’s “predilection for making ambivalent ensembles that suggest use and non-use values simultaneously”. They invite, without delivering, the viewers comprehension.
Olivia Bax, Roost (2018). Steel, mesh, chicken wire, newspapers, glue, plaster, paint. 228 x 170 x 160 cm. Lily Brooke Gallery, London. Photo: Corey Bartle Sanderson.
I can identify in this some of the concerns central to my practice. Certain negative spaces – ones that read as pockets, boxes or holes – cause us as viewers to fill in the blank. We imagine what could or should go inside, or if the view is partially obscured, what might be in there. The sheer size of Roost amplifies the architectural elements present in Bax’s smaller works. The constant features of “conduit forms” and “forms of containment” become human in scale (Wood 2022).
These architectural aspects, as well as the use of industrial materials like steel rods and mesh, are something I am looking to explore more in my practice. I think that their solidity and implication of utility would, when paired with the kind of soft sculpture I have been working in, offer something simultaneously more deliberate and more ambiguous. I contemplate Bax’s material choices further down below.
Affordances
In the late seventies, psychologist James Gibson coined the term ‘affordances’: properties of an object or environment that suggest how it’s to be used, i.e. the action that the user can infer they could or should take.
“The composition and layouts of surface constitute what they afford… to perceive them is to perceive what they afford.” (Gibson, 1979)
Researcher Don Norman (1998) argues for a deeper consideration of the subjectivity of this perception, particularly in design features. The same element might not be interpreted as the same affordance in two different cultures, for example. In our art practices, we must contend with the fact that we can’t control how work is read by individuals.
Incorporating elements of design and usability in my artworks inevitably leads to the perception of affordances. In crits, the question of potential functions of my work arises time and time again. I find that people will acknowledge that the object is not ‘for’ one purpose or another, almost as a disclaimer, so that they can then speculate on what it could be used for – a cat’s bed, a seat, a container?
A design element that appears usable but isn’t – e.g. a decorative button – falsely affords a use. Art objects, then, that suggest function are inherently falsely affording use (unless it is explicitly stated that the artwork is participatory or touchable). It’s not that you physically couldn’t push the button, lift the flap or place something inside the pocket, but the social conventions of an exhibition space tell you that you can’t.
Lipsum. beach towel, polyester stuffing, cardboard. 70 x 70 x 70 cm
The inherent ambiguity in what we can recognise as a false affordance is a key line of inquiry in my practice. Looking to the upcoming MA Summer Show, I had been grappling with the question of whether to encourage viewers to touch or interact with my work. The tactility of the fabrics I use, the softness of the stuffed forms and the curious nature of ‘functional’ elements are in themselves a kind of invitation touch. In the environment of crits or pop-up shows where I am present throughout, people will ask if they can touch the work, use the work. I am always interested in observing the ways in which they then interact with the objects.
As previously stated, the invitation to do this must be made explicit in a typical exhibition setting. Ultimately, I have decided not to do this. In a more typical presentation of the work, though, without verbal or written permission to do this, questions go unanswered. Can I touch it? Is there anything inside those pockets? Is that form as soft as it looks, or is there a harder structure underneath? What is this for? I choose to provide minimal exposition to accompany my work (e.g. in wall text) and the absence of directions given to the viewer is an extension of this.
Nicolas Deshayes
Nicolas Deshayes’ 2019 exhibition Swans consisted of a series of ceramic pieces reminiscent of utilitarian, domestic features that have been glazed with retro muted tones. The forms are bodily – referencing buttocks, genitalia and breasts – spoken in the polite language of modular sterility. Critic Louise Darblay lauds their “summoning [of] the kitschy, intimate world of a private bathroom”. She continues:
“There’s a distant echo of Minimalism’s formalist approach … yet the works’ sensuality, taunting playfulness and referencing of the most basic details of our daily lives feel refreshingly free of deadening conceptual rigour and rigid principles.”
Nicolas Deshayes, Lakes (2018) Glazed slip-cast earthenware. Combined: 48 x 49 x 11 cm. As exhibited in: Swans (2019). Photo: Ben Westoby. Courtesy the artist & Modern Art, London
Nicolas Deshayes, Fresh Towels (2018) Glazed slip-cast earthenware. Combined: 9 x 64 x 40 cm. As exhibited in: Swans (2019). Photo: Ben Westoby. Courtesy the artist & Modern Art, London
The non-representational, form-focused approach of formalist sculpture is influential to my practice, too. But I am particularly interested in the ways in which post-minimalist sculpture simultaneously references and subverts the formal conventions of its minimalist predecessors. In a talk Deshayes gave to our MA cohort, he described how he “fetishised minimalist materials” in his production of “sumptuous, bodily” forms.
In my practice, the rejection of formalist purity is in part a rejection of sterility. My materials speak of the body itself: old towels, blankets and bedsheets. These are things we sweat in, sleep in, clean with, that might smell like us or our home. Their industrially produced origins are a far cry from their more recent, grubbier life.
Not so for Deshayes, who uses slip casting, an industrial method of mass production that creates pleasingly perfect forms. His subversion, then, is not only in the abstracted body parts he represents but also in the suggestion of function: affordances. The affordance is by its very nature representational.
Walking around the Swans exhibition seems like it might have been like walking around a hardware shop. Seeing all the disembodied features of kitchens or bathrooms, stripped of their context, makes you see them for what they are: slightly absurd objects. I see the similarity between Deshayes’ ceramics and my own work. If these pieces were not in fact art objects, only ‘things’, you might feel you could pick them up, put them in the ‘correct’ context and suddenly all would become clear – ‘ah, that’s what it’s for!’. And so they sit, somewhere in between representation and abstraction.
Material
In anthropologist Tim Ingold’s Making, he recounts how, in a course he was teaching, students were instructed to first bring into class a collection of found objects. They brought in items like coins, cigarette butts, feathers. He describes how these objects, discarded and decontextualised from their past lives, were “left lifeless”. The next week the students were asked to bring in found materials. This time they brought in containers of sand, mud, leaf mulch. Unlike in their examination of the objects the previous week, the group got their hands dirty investigating the materials; the reverence for the “stillness of form” was gone.
Ingold points out that in simply shifting our perspective, objects can be thought of as material. He uses the example of a saucepan: an object in the hands of a cook but, to a scrap metal dealer, it’s material.
“By treating these erstwhile objects as materials, we rescue them from the cul-de-sac into which they had been cast and restore them to the currents of life.”
I found this framing particularly pertinent to my recent inclusion of found objects in my work. Lipsum ii consists of a stuffed fabric cylinder, made to the same dimensions as the found table that sits on top of it. I think my struggle to view the table (or its component parts) as material, and not object, can be read in this work. It’s modular. This is not inherently problematic but it doesn’t reflect the kind of homogenous composition that I’m seeking.
Lipsum ii. Towels, polyester stuffing, glass-topped metal table. 50 x 50 x 100 cm
Olivia Bax, for example, has developed a method of sculpting pigmented paper pulp directly on to armatures of chicken wire, mesh and steel rods. In Roost the steel rods in the armature can clearly be seen in parts but the paper pulp envelopes the entire structure. Where does the form end and the surface begin? What is the object and what is the material?
I have long used reclaimed fabrics in my work. The minute I fold up an old towel and place it in my bag of materials, that’s exactly what it becomes. Then, when I have manipulated it in some way, it’s once again an object – an art object. This last transformation isn’t as cut-and-dried; I often salvage and reuse the materials from my own artworks. Moving forward in my practice, Ingold’s ideas about the mutability of the boundary between object and material are at the forefront of my mind when making. But I know that for me, when working with non-fabric found objects, that shift occurs in a transformation that conceals or confuses the item’s original form. Only then do I feel like the “currents of life” have been restored.
Looking Forward
So far in Units 1 and 2, my work has distinctly consisted of object-making. For the MA Summer Show, I want to incorporate a further element of installation. This feels like a natural evolution – I have exhibited all my resolved works as floor-based. While there would still be a sense of an object (insofar as an object might have a perceived function), I want there to be more of a singular superstructure that blurs the boundaries between the floor, the display device and the object itself.
At present, I am exploring the homogenising quality of a singular fabric ‘skin’. I am also considering the potential for a kind of raised bed that acts simultaneously as plinth, container and the artwork itself. I would look for a subtle intervention in the exhibition space. This doesn’t need to be transformational as such, but perhaps the ambiguity of the form will – in its relationship to the room itself – confer some of that ambiguity onto the space as a whole. Related to these ideas are my previously stated plans to incorporate more architectural or rigid, industrial elements which would echo the wider place in which the work sits.
References
Darblay, L. (2019). Nicolas Deshayes at Modern Art, Vyner Street, London. https://artreview.com/ar-april-2019-review-nicolas-deshayes/.
Gibson, J. (1979). ‘The Theory of Affordances’, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, pp. 127-139
Ingold, T. (2013). Making: Anthropology, Archeology, Art and Architecture, Social Anthropology. Oxford: Routledge, pp. 20-25.
McDonald, F. (2013). ‘John Summers’, Thinking is Making: Presence and Absence in Contemporary Sculpture. London: Black Dog Publishing, pp. 108–127.
Soegaard, M. (2015, July 5). Affordances. Interaction Design Foundation - IxDF. https://www.interaction-design.org/literature/book/the-glossary-of-human-computer-interaction/affordances
Wood, J. (2022). Text by Jon Wood for solo exhibition Home Range at Holtermann Fine Art. https://www.oliviabax.co.uk/about
Images
https://dailyartfair.com/exhibition/9084/nicolas-deshayes-modern-art