A-Repetition

Essay  by Pip Hudd (@__pip__) 

Cradled in the fabric that you are carefully unspooling and allowing to bunch around your ankles in the dark I stretch out and turn in my almost sleep. The pins, with which you are quietly attaching square to square to quilt a grid, dig into the bumps below the back of my neck and I am awake.

The quilt, a surface that disforms to open a pocket of space in the shape of a sleeping body, is sewn together by the repeated and intentional movements of wrists and fingers. This corporeal investment can be traced to the ‘sweated trades’ where women made lace and quilts, isolated in their homes for long hours and low pay. Skillful and detailed, but highly repetitive work that extracted a noiseless accumulated sacrifice of fingers and eyesight from long hours of concentration. This is not to overlook also the anticipative investment of fingers into quilts that have long been part of protest, lovingly prepared to be carried on marches from Jarrow to Greenham.

The physical ‘home’ contained within a folded masonry surface, the space under the quilt and the body covered in the sack of skin that keeps it organized all take on the same structure. Each appears as an inside constituted by a thin surface that differentiates it from its outside. They are depths that are safe and whole, organized by surfaces that act as a border. A pure being kept carefully separate from the non-being of the external. Zoe Wu and Georgia Salmond set out to confront such a topology in their duo exhibition A Repetition by showing the inside is always uncannily haunted by that which it excludes. The ghost of a forgotten pin pierces our dreams just as the space left by the index of the sleeping body in the folds of the quilt is haunted by the quiet and forgotten corporeal investment of the quiltmaker. It is no accident that the uncanny, a word whose meaning is permanently inflected by Freud to indicate the return of the repressed, was translated from the German: unheimlich or unhomely.

Salmond applies Heidegger’s claim that the creation of a vase brings into existence both an object and a void in Look What the Cat Dragged In. The model’s body becomes inverted in the casting process to form a delicate container which creates an absence. Moving closer, this delicacy gives way to the abject and the body as absence uncannily returns. These containers, made from the surface of the body, could never hope to organize its entrails, they allow a line of sight through them and in so doing spill out the bodies excess emptiness onto the gallery floor. The inside of the body (and the domestic surface of the middle-class home, which in the rug returns an unacknowledged colonial corporeal foundation) is shot through with its own absence.

Wu suspends ceramic Hú lu (Calabash) gourds from a geometric grid that invokes the slats of a child’s bed. These gourds, traditionally grown for use as a container, also invoke nostalgic childhood memories of the cartoon Hú lu wá. Wu therefore brings a different kind of surface into focus. Whilst Salmond’s contorted ‘shells’ fail to hold the body’s organs and showing the depth they designate as empty, Wu’s surface is temporal. For her, nostalgia is ultimately tinged with loss. Some of the gourds find themselves open at their base, nullifying their possibility of containing a stable past. The gourds fail to maintain a temporally stable structure and threaten to be pulled apart by gravity as they drip towards the ground. They try but fail to contain and hold fixed a lost contentment that shows itself as an intergenerational absence. An absence that might be imagined akin to the sinking feeling in the drop of your stomach as a lift descends. For Wu, the nostalgic is a surface that creates a sensation of envelopment in the depth of a past but is ultimately found to be punctured by a sinking and claustrophobic emptiness.

The fantasy of a depth that reveals an absence continues in another of Wu’s pieces Phoning Home. Here the imaginary inside takes shape as the space hidden beneath the duvet. Yet this place of supposed safety is haunted by the emergence of ceramic crabs. They are poised at the boundary between nostalgia (invoking Wu’s own childhood memories), fragility or uncertainty (in the crab’s breakable materiality) and uncanny distress (in the sharpness of the claw and alien form). The warm space of the bed takes on a negative valence in the same moment that it implies safety. Both the temporal safety of nostalgia and the physical architecture of the childhood bedroom become tinged with a elusive but incarcerating anguish.

Salmond continues these themes of an entrapment that haunts the fantasy of a safe inside. The subtle curvature of her Ivy pieces act as index to the tree that the cast ivy has smothered. Without casting the dead tree itself, the convex positivity of the resins surface immediately implies a depth. The fibrous laying down of strands that make up its structure point us directly to the mode in which a surface can create the illusion of a depth. The roughness of the cast structurally mirrors the folded skin in Look What the Cat Dragged In: it is only through the sinewy and uneven corporeality of the surface that we can grasp at the fantasy of a depth. The Freudian slip hints at an unconscious depth that is really an absence via a wrinkle in the surface of our otherwise smoothly logical speech. Likewise, the overlaps and frayed ends of the ivy’s vines create the fantasy of something beyond the surface, whilst remaining resolutely at the surface. The texture of the resin appears like skin under a microscope, perhaps individual cells which, when joined to make the surface of the body, mirror the squares of Salmond’s quilt of human hair. Yet here in the quilt the careful repetition of stitching together this delicate but coarse fabric comes to the fore.

Perhaps this then is the shared core of Wu and Salmond’s project: the designation of a protected inside via the creation of a surface imbued with a repetitive bodily investment and a humble and quiet carefulness that is nonetheless pierced by an abject loss.