Curated by Tiffany Zabludowicz
"Rooms are shells, they are skins. Peel off one skin after the other, discard it: the repressed, the neglected, the wasted, the lost, the sunken, the flattened, the desolate, the reversed, the diluted, the forgotten, the persecuted, the wounded."
Heidi Bucher
This exhibition brings together four multigenerational female artists, Rebecca Ackroyd (b. 1987, Gloucestershire, UK) , Heidi Bucher (1926, Winterthur - 1993 Brunnen, Switzerland), Emily Moore (b. 1984, Scotland, UK), and Kaari Upson (1970–2021, California, USA), who draw a connection between the body and the spaces it occupies as a method of highlighting and subverting structural and societal issues and questions around identity.
The title of the exhibition ‘Work From Home’ is a pun as the setting of the exhibition, Siegfried Contemporary, is located in the home of Andreas Siegfried and artists’ intimate gestures carry universal meaning and demonstrate the intricate and complex traumas and psychoses of everyday contemporary lives. Works become the doublings that connect past, present and future and relics and memories of collective experience and personal experience.
In times of conflict questions around domesticity become paramount and during the COVID-19 crisis these matters were exacerbated as the phrase ‘Work From Home’ became ubiquitous. Divisions between professional life and domestic life dissipated as parents worked from their living rooms while caring for their children and employees Zoomed into work from their bedrooms, often revealing otherwise hidden moments of their private lives. Many artists lost their studios and their works adjusted to the new conditions of their residences, for example Emily Moore began to weave with her mother at home. Weaving is a ritual passed down to her through generations and thus held associations of childhood memories which were cathartic during a psychologically challenging time. It was evoked that lockdowns were equalising forces as every human was supposedly held under the same conditions in their homes yet it was in this heightened moment that disparities and power structures were most exposed. This exhibition highlights that societal relationships to space continually shift and evolve yet they still remain mired in struggles that are outdated in a contemporary context.
Upson replicated objects that expose the fragility of American life. Living in San Bernadino, California, Upson was only too familiar with the environmental and societal dangers that encroached everyday life, whether it be wildfires, earthquakes, droughts, rampant crimes or the simple dangers of American consumerism. Over a prolific twenty year career Upson created a language of doubling, taking objects from everyday life and highlighting the psychology that accompanied them. In this exhibition, cast parts of cut down trees stand boldly yet vulnerable and their rings become evocations of time cut short. The trees were originally planted outside her home but had to be cut down to avoid wildfires, thus their beautiful frames stand in this exhibition as victims of their environment and as symbols of danger.
In Ackroyd’s delicate surrealist drawings the body commingles with urban infrastructure to explore the contemporary experiences of femininity in urban space. Femininity is suggested but fragmented as collective and personal memories cling to the surface of her works as the body subtly merges with its environment. For example, in Untitled, 2020, fishnets become a fence around a belly button that is locked into the expectations around its gender while maintaining a sensuousness provided by the soft strokes of the pastel.
There is a challenging physicality to the process of making of works in this show, whether it be casting, weaving, or drawing. A pioneering artist Bucher began exploring the relationship between gender and space by applying latex to spaces that were of larger cultural significance and with great physical effort, peeling the latex from buildings creating skin-textured replicas called ‘Raumhauts’ or ‘room skins’, a process that was simultaneously intricate and forceful. With this act she subverted the undercurrent of social and gender roles that played out in the spaces and made permanent as an artwork a memory or evidence of the walls and architecture that defined it. In Switzerland women only gained the right to vote in 1973 and thus her deeply feminist pieces hang with the heavy weight of a time of suppression of her gender. The skin-like texture of the work brings to the mind-eye a vision of the body and draws into focus the relationship between spaces that define psychologies and the body itself.
