Cathy Wilkes
Cherry Smyth
Milton Keynes Gallery April 16 to June 8 2008
Cathy Wilkes's work has a quiet wrongness that feels quite right. In an exhibition that includes sculpture, paintings and video, she uses standstills to make us consider what is indispensable for human use. Wilkes's objects behave in a sly combination that hints at narrative and then retracts it, resulting in a sense of suspension and emotional separation.
The mixed media installation (We Are) Pro Choice, 2008, resembles a set for an Absurdist play, after the drama has occurred, the props unusable or used up. Two rungs of a tall wooden ladder have been removed and burnt, the charred remains laid in a row on the floor; a female mannequin, seated on a purple loo, has been 'dressed' in a headband of wire and string that obscures her eyes and from which hang a ladder rung, a string of bells, a china cup, a Le Creuset frying pan and a long, spoon-shaped plastic grid; a large trifle bowl has been scraped clean, the spoon left in it; a double oven serves as a counter for a broken wine glass, a jar of skin cream, loose strands of hair, a jar of Bonne Maman jam smeared with a film of its contents. Associations ricochet between bulimia/anorexia and the enforced thinness of beauty, and spread to the wider context of nourishment, nurturing and the dilemma of the domestic faced by the clothed, living woman. The burnt ladder emits the signal of thwarted female potential, its sooty ashes anointing the head of the harassed model mum who can never be bonne enough.
Somewhere between a shrine and a sacrifice, the mannequin poses in wry mockery of the fulfilment women are offered by conventional roles of romance, motherhood and domestication. Objects that seem provisional are carefully placed: an AA battery stood upright under a Pyrex bowl. The random and the reasoned slip over each other: dried rosebuds - in a scattered heart on a lurid yellow rubber mat - are poignant one minute and punchy the next. It reminds me of being burgled and coming home to find the thief's cigarette stubbed out in the sugar bowl on the table. It was so shocking, compact and indelible that it became the intrusion and the theft. Something here has been stolen, something the owner didn't know she had, and the everyday items around her are made to stand in for and attempt to express what's missing. The piece recalls Louise Bourgeois's 1947 Femme Maison and Sandy Orgel's 1972 Linen Closet in which she built the shelves of a linen cupboard around a female mannequin, describing the living structures that construct femininity. Wilkes's play with the low-level punishment many women undergo for not being good at femininity, at mothering, at putting things in the right place, is both masochistically funny and robustly sad.
Untitled, 2008, in another room, switches mood and tactics. In a makeshift mortuary, bundles of reeds and bull rushes lie on the floor, some covered with plastic sheets, others exposed. A stack of terracotta floor tiles stands at the centre like a grave marker. While (We Are) Pro Choice proliferates with readings and the choices that women are made to believe they have won, this piece exudes the finality of death and the end of choice. Is this unsheltered openness the alternative to the confines of the kitchen? Here is the end of parenting, an aura of orphaned silence.
The room of five paintings suggests another threshold: conception and birth. Most of the small works use an upside down china saucer stuck on to canvas and a handwritten pencilled phrase that conjures maternal ambivalence: 'she's pregnant again', 'teenage mother', 'listen to god', bringing us round again to the more blatant reading of the Pro Choice piece. While the saucer evokes the rejection of the ritual of tea drinking associated with our more successfully serving grandmothers, it also suggests an inverted Petri dish, and the denial of the medical/biological truth. Nonetheless, the nature/nurture dialectic somehow gets muted rather than expanded in these 3D, readymade paintings.
In her video, Most Women Never Experience, 2005, Wilkes wonders how to represent the female nude and the pregnant nude without the male canon inserting itself. Can a naked woman walk down a staircase without Duchamp being present? Its casual domestic setting and offhand editing recall Jaki Irvine's early videos and her assertion of the extraordinary in the everyday. But Wilkes's images cannot unhinge aspects of femininity as successfully or as confidently as her post-theatrical sculptures and their clever, arresting economies of place and placement.
This review was originally published in May 2007 / No 317, p24-25.
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