RIMS

Essay by Pip Hudd (@__pip__)

In 1975 a little man turned to those blessed souls present at his seminar to impart them the wisdom that “something one seldom thinks of is to turn the left-hand glove inside out, and put it on the right hand”. He referred to the relationship between Nora Barnacle and her husband James Joyce – famous for its love letters filled with “wild filth and obscenity” (on Joyce’s own admission).

Through casts from life inverted in latex, Salmond understands the inside-out glove, the skin that almost but not quite fits, as a moment of encounter that fizzes with all that cannot quite be. Joyce is famous for his scatological fascinations and this field of uneasy and almost comic anality (man-hole) is drawn upon in Rims to traverse the awkwardly unspeakable possibilities of that which we have placed just out of reach.

A toilet (Shits) squirms itself through the floor and stands in uneasy opposition to a small and detailed piece of soap (Giggles) that quilts the show into a meditation on those instants of permeability and interchange in the body (and social fabric) marked by embarrassment and humour.

The sewer system whisks away our bodily excretions so that we do not have to encounter them. Pipes are hidden in walls and under the ground, workers come at night to haul away our rubbish. We hope that these operations magic away all those excretions which conjure that which Kristeva would call abject. But pipes always emerge somewhere, and the sharp noises of the bin lorry weave themselves into our dreams in the early morning.

The rims where the darkness of the sewer opens into the light of the home, like the funeral, become spaces of ritual and reverence. We invest our bodily affects at the event horizon of the social world and collar them into deference – the bathroom door must be locked whilst shitting and hands washed thoroughly with soap in a prespecified pattern, the cutlery is to be arranged precisely, wedding rings carefully removed whilst washing up, bins taken out every Tuesday with the yogurt pot lids washed perfectly clean.  

The rim has a dual function: to cover over the abject whilst acting as a totem around which to constitute our bodies. Salmond draws attention to this through the intricate and recurring patterns to be found on the manhole cover, sublimated in the careful process of casting and display that conjures the religious icon. Patterns that, like the rituals of defecation and eating, are rendered invisible and ethereal by their frequency and absentminded repetition become ribs and warts pushing through flesh. Their materiality and unique specificity (emphasised by their spatial titles) bring the endless run of ritualistic repetitions that hide the body in their monotony to a halt and cause it to appear like Nora and Joyce show themselves to each other through the obscenity of the inside out glove.

Salmond recalls references to the body in her previous work as a defunct container that cannot hope to hold all that it is supposed to contain. The rim is a paradigmatic container, one that has been reduced to its essential mathematical limit. At this limit, the centrality of the rim comes into view – a structure that is also an opening. Nora and Joyce appear to each other in obscenity.

Georgia Salmond is an artist living and working in East London. She…