2020 > FABRIC: TOUCH AND IDENTITY
The exhibition Fabric: touch and identity interrogated the sensuous qualities of cloth that allow an exploration of our hidden selves and that of the Other.
What we set out to do
To produce an exhibition developed from themes identified within the book The Erotic Cloth Works in the exhibition to be drawn from painting, photography, film, dress and cloth itself.
What we achieved
An exhibition shown at Compton Verney Gallery showing from March 14th - December 31st 2020. The 16 artists, drawn from an international, contemporary and historical cohort, ranged from Joshua Reynolds to Cathy de Monchaux, from a traditional Haori Shunga (erotic) kimono to a specially commissioned, immersive installation by Japanese designer Reiko Sudo.
‘A cliché-busting project, which pushed past easy assumptions about gender and sexuality’
The Arts Society Magazine
Statistics
In total, we were able to open for 18 weeks of the exhibition run. During this time the Gallery welcomed 2,641 visitors into the exhibition for socially-distanced visits. These were very well received both locally and nationally, attracting new audiences to Compton Verney. As an immediate response to the lockdown we created a series of short films featuring some of works from the exhibition. These proved extremely popular and in total the films were viewed 7,558 times on our website. Extracts from them saw further engagement through Compton Verney social media channels, with 5,144 views on Facebook, 3,966 views on Instagram and 2,130 views on Twitter.
The exhibition received press coverage in Selvedge and The Arts Society Magazine, and was featured on BBC Radio 4’s Saturday Review. While we were sadly not able to pursue all of our planned events, but we successfully livestreamed an ‘In Conversation’ between Lesley Millar and Reiko Sudo online which sold 75 tickets.
Comments from our visitors on social media have included:
‘Out to @compton_verney today to see the Fabric, touch and identity exhibition. I loved the work by @alicekettle The piece radiates light and I am in awe at how she uses the threads to create this radiance. The fan room was also a joy to be in… Lots of info on the website if you can’t make it there.’
‘Stunning pieces of textile art’
‘It is absolutely worth the pilgrimage!
Prue Leith with Fanfare
Fabric: touch and identity
As our second skin, fabric is the mediating surface between our physical body and the world beyond. The intimate touch of cloth on skin is a universal but often overlooked experience, while fabric plays an essential role in how we fashion our public identity.
This exhibition focuses on the sensual nature of the relationship between cloth and the body and draws upon both historical and contemporary art. Works by a range of international artists, working in different media, develop the intimate, playful, exciting and seductive qualities of fabric, revealing the fundamental role that it has played in defining identity.
The exhibition is divided into three themes, however the dividing line between the themes is as fluid as the cloth itself.
ONE: Sensuous Cloth
For centuries, the personal, tactile relationship between cloth and the body has permeated a range of art forms. For the portraitist, the accurate depiction of fabric becomes an essential narrative tool; with the drape and texture of a sitter’s outfit clothing them in layers of meaning. The sculptor traces the lines of the body with cloth, while for the dancer, body and cloth form a shared relationship of veiling and revealing. The works on display here also explore the sensual appeal of cloth in movement: ambiguous, embracing and seemingly impossible to contain.
Rūta Naujalytė (Lithuania)
Title: 'My love, I will eat you alive' (Mano Meile, surysiu Tave gyvą)
2016 - Wallpaper
This wallpaper is a reproduction of textile amulets that have been photographed and repeated in multiples to make a wall covering of flower-like images. The definition of an amulet is a good luck charm that offers protection. Suggesting the power and beauty of female sexuality, and the protection of its sanctity, the work is a celebration of passionate love.
Joshua Reynolds (UK)
Title: 'Mrs Baldwin in Eastern Dress'
1782 - Oil on canvas
Jane Baldwin’s middle-eastern outfit reflects her biography – the daughter of an English merchant, she was born in Turkey and married George Baldwin, British Consul in Alexandria. Here she deliberately exaggerates what society in England at the time perceived to be exotic, by posing in a turban, green-and-gold kaftan, and ermine over gown, surrounded by luscious fabrics. She evidently enjoyed this projected image of herself, using it to describe her hidden Other.
Nina Saunders (UK)
Title: 'Laurent'
2015 - re-cycled and altered chair with newly designed upholstery
Nina Saunders fashions discarded, second-hand armchairs into absurd anthropomorphic forms. Rather than being a utilitarian objects, the chairs become responsive, sensual and alive: at once strangely disturbing and comic. Originally belonging to a series titled Greta’s Party, Saunders describes the character of this particular chair: ‘Laurent, formerly a pattern cutter for a Parisian couturier, is now an interior designer. He has a stubborn pride in his taste and his motto is: ‘Laurent, Laurent begin once more’.
Liz Rideal (UK)
Title: 'Terme di Diocleziano' (The Baths of Diocletian)
2017 - Inkjet on silk georgette
This triptych exposes the different properties of real and sculpted cloth. Monumental sculptures from the Baths of Diocletian, the public baths in ancient Rome, have been photographed with freeform flying silk, caught in three balletic movements. Held in momentary tension against the carved folds of the sculpture, the billowing silk suggest a fleeting human presence against static stone.
Lumière Brothers (France)
Title: 'Serpentine Dance')
c.1899
In this dance, captured on film by the Lumière brothers and hand coloured, the dancer uses cloth and body extensions to accentuate her movement whilst concealing her actual body. The lengths of rippling silk and lighting add to the sensuality and excitement of the performance. There is some dispute about the dancer's identity – she is credited with being the American actress Loie Fuller (1862-1928) but she may be Papinta, The Flame Dancer, both pioneers of modern dance and theatrical effects.
TWO: The Responsive Body
Our clothing is our second skin, meaning that fabric plays an essential role in sexuality, intimacy and the fashioning of personal identities. Bringing together the private and public spheres, some of the pieces on display in this room are overtly political, representing personal responses to issues, fantasies or questions that were facing their creators. In all of the works cloth is the medium of choice: richly permeated with bodily experiences, its cut, feel, smell, and sound can both engage our senses and subvert our expectations.
Alice Kettle (UK)
Title: 'Adam and Eve'
2020 - Print and thread on cotton sateen
According to the book of Genesis, the first consequence of Adam and Eve’s sin was that ‘the eyes of both were opened, and they knew that they were naked. And they sewed fig leaves together and made themselves loincloths.’ Referencing versions of this subject by Lucas Cranach the Elder (c. 1472-553), the figures here have been scaled up to human proportions and made decorative through psychedelic colour and embroidery.
Nigel Hurlstone (UK)
Title: 'What Pleasure', one of 12
2013 - Cotton organdie, cotton and burmilana thread, digital print, couching
In this work erotic photographic images from the private collection of Montague Glover (1910-1950) are digitally printed onto cotton organdie and then machine embroidered using ombre thread. The image becomes veiled, the subject left floating somewhere indecipherable between the threads. Hurlstone describes how: ‘between those threads lies joy and anguish, a guilty conscience and sublime sexual pleasure.’
Vivienne Westwood (UK)
Title: 'Men’s red bondage suit'
c.1980 - Malcolm Garrett Collection, Special Collections, Manchester Metropolitan University
Vivienne Westwood’s iconic designs reference punk counterculture of the 1970s and 80s by subverting the social and moral structures of decency and privilege, using underwear as overwear, and fetish clothes as everyday garments. This red suit, with its bondage allusions conveyed by strap between the legs, is elegant and expertly cut - it is about being powerful, alternative and superhuman.
Raisa Kabir (UK)
Feminist Fabric: A Fat Corset
2010 - Cotton, hand printed silk muslin, metal spoon busk
This corset is contradictory since it does not contain the flesh, but lets it loose. It was produced in response to the constricting garments that housed women’s flesh in the past and today’s increasingly unattainable body image. Kabir describes how: ‘Women are told they can have whatever they want… can take their clothes off and be as sexy as they like, but in turn it is this pressure, it is this constraint on women to look a certain way, is often what limits them.’
Cathy de Monchaux (UK)
Title: 'Erase'
1989 - Denim, velvet, steel bolts and PVC - Tate
This work questions notions of femaleness and maleness and their perceived separateness. The phallic steel bolt sits inside a denim sheath lined with red velvet, evoking both male and female genitalia. Cut from a pair of de Monchaux’s own jeans, which she has referred to as her ‘heroic studio jeans’, the work subverts the tradition of the macho artist-creator.
Beverly Ayling-Smith (UK)
Title: 'Paradise Lost’
2019 - Digital print and embroidery
Drawing on imagery from traditional Toile de Jouy prints of idyllic countryside, this triptych is over-layered with silk organza on which are printed excerpts from John Milton’s epic poem Paradise Lost (1667). The work explores three moments from the story: the location of Eden; the moment of Adam and Eve’s temptation; the loss of Paradise in the revelation of nakedness and difference.
THREE: Between Cloth and Skin
Cloth traces and echoes the body, falling, rippling around and draping the form, enfolding the space between being and becoming. Overlooked, everyday aspects of our lives maintain the imprint of our passing, recorded by, in or on cloth; the surfaces reminding us that both cloth and skin may be cut, or pierced or simply witness to the passage of time. The works in this room use fabric to reference the absent body, the space between and around the body: what has been, what might have been...
Bob White (UK)
Title: 'Between Cloth and Skin'
2004 - Acrylic on calico
In this painting the artist is looking to discover ways in which the viewer may experience that space between cloth and skin, which is the most intimate and secret of spaces, touching and not touching the body. The body is glimpsed through the cloth, which drapes, moves and surrounds as the figure moves with an unguarded abandon.
Susie MacMurray (UK)
Title: 'After Shell'
2006 - Mixed media (mussel shells stuffed with silk velvet) - Pallant House
This is a section from an installation of 20,000 shells which originally covered the staircase walls of Pallant House Gallery, Chichester. The half open shells were used by MacMurray to symbolise the sterility of the marriage of the house’s original owners, Henry Peckham and his wife, Elizabeth Albery. Each shell is a ‘petit mort’, with the individual red silk velvet linings expressing sensual desire, trapped within the shells.
Annie Bascoul (France)
Title: 'Vivre et rêver... en dentelle'
2015 - Collection of the artist
Lace simultaneously conceals and reveals, denoting the forbidden, the boundary between known and unknown. This net dress, made from brass thread and based on Valenciennes lace, sculpts the female body. A voluptuous form in space, its fragile, ethereal lightness is enhanced by the shadows thrown on the surrounding floor and walls, reminding us of the space between cloth and skin.
Alison Watt (UK)
Title: 'Drift'
2015 - Oil on canvas
Watt’s paintings of fabric are portraits, they tell us about the human body through its absence. The artist has described how, even as a child: ‘I was always drawn to the pictures of fabric and drapery – how it folds, and how it seems to move when the body moves.’ Watt’s paintings move towards abstraction, with the intense study of cloth conveying a quiet sense of intimacy, sensuality and emotional depth.
Maxine Bristow (UK)
Title: 'Materially Measured'
2019 - Mixed Media
Maxine Bristow’s work is concerned with the overlooked relationship that we have with textiles in everyday life. Fabric humanises the mundane built environment surrounding us: examples being the seats, padding and armrests on public transport. 'Materially Measured' prompts us to reconsider our everyday experience of fabric, and the material contact where body meets world, and environments are rendered less alienating by the use of fabric.
Haori Shunga Kimono (Japan)
1890 to 1920 - Silk
The hidden and intimate relationship between the body and clothing has been formalised in Japan in the traditional Haori kimono jackets worn by men. Plain and unostentatious on the outside, inside these are lined with fine silk with beautiful erotic (Shunga) images - hidden from view, next to the skin, and known only to the wearer.
Suzumi Noda (Japan)
Title: 'Woman washing her hair'
2019 - Knitted Urushi Columns
This work references the sensual woodcuts of Japanese artist Kitagawa Utamaro (c. 1753-1806), which depict young women combing and washing their hair. Here a column has been knitted from urushi thread by contemporary textile artist Suzumi Noda. Urushi is a type of Japanese laquer, which coats silk thread, giving the column the weight and shimmer of wet hair.
NUNO WHOLE ROOM INSTALLATION
Title: 'Ogi no mai / Fanfare
textiles: Reiko Sudo of Nuno corporation
scenography: Adrien Gardère of Studio Adrien Gardère
production: Kazuhiro Ueno of Nuno corporation
2020 - Cotton, Linen, Ramie, Silk, Paper,Nylon, polyester all dyed in an indigo colour pallet.
Cotton, Linen, Ramie, Silk, Paper,Nylon, polyester all dyed in an indigo colour pallet.
This installation features over 200 traditional ogi folding fans, made from textiles created in Japan. A Japanese invention dating back to the 10th century, ogi fans are made of paper pasted over wooden ribs. Serving as a practical means of cooling off, the fan also performs many important roles in Japanese culture. The fan has been universally used as an extension of the body, creating its own language of sensuality and seduction. Open fans express the auspicious symbolism of increasing good fortunes or suehiro (‘spreading out’) associated with celebrations and happy occasions.