“The world is a mass of laundry”

18cm x 16 cm x 13cm

 

Description

Wire cage, wooden frame. Bits of striped ‘flag’ ribbons hanging on two wire ‘clothes lines’, among them two pieces crocheted from sewing thread, one white, one red.

 

Themes, comments & storylines

 

As ever, a work arising from serendipity – a cage that once housed an Easter chocolate rabbit given to me by my children – “we thought you might be able to use the cage for your artwork.” Painted dark it takes on purely by change of colour a different significance. Ribbons, bought on a study trip to Glasgow to see textile artist Deirdre Nelson who also, in different ways, engages with the small stories she comes across.

 

The entanglement of things: heaps of clothes or laundry, as Michel Serres suggests, or, as in the work of NS Harsha Nations, the entangled threads of their making: the world as a giant sweatshop.

 

Questions of scale and significance of what moves, disturbs and intrigues us.

 

For the metaphor/image of the washing line, see Memory Work

 

“Tissue, textile and fabric provide excellent models of knowledge, excellent quasi-abstract objects, primal varieties: the world is a mass of laundry.”

Michel Serres, The Five Senses (1998)

in Connor, Steven, 2005. Michel Serres’ five senses. In: Howes, David ed., 2005. Empire of the senses: The sensual culture reader. Oxford, New York: Berg, p.

 

“We must rid ourselves of the delusion that it is the major events which have the most decisive influence on us. We are much more deeply and continuously influenced by the tiny catastrophes that make up daily life.”

 Siegfied Kracauer, Die Angestellten, in Schriften, Vol.1, 252, quoted in Kracauer, Siegfried (1995), The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays, translated, edited and with an introduction by Thomas Y. Levin, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts & London, England, p.5

 

"People under capitalism continue to mark sacred and ceremonial moments with banners, hangings, shrouds and robes….notwithstanding the spread of capitalism, political and religious elites still depend upon cloth to mobilize human emotions in support of such large-scale institutions as the nation state. Flags and military uniforms are two powerful examples."

Annette B. Weiner & Jane Schneider (1989) (eds), Cloth and Human Experience, Smithsonian Institution Press, Washington and London  pp. 10, 11