I always want to enjoy exhibitions at outpost, sometimes I do. I always intend to go to Outpost forearmed with at least some research on the artist, this time I didn’t. I paid for my mistake, Large blown up photo’s of Loestrin – a contraceptive pill. Clothing that has been unpicked and carefully ironed then pinned to large pieces of cardboard, scraps of clothing cut into neat squares and laid out on a table, a box on the floor with photo’s stuck to the top, a table with yellow notes ambiguously written. a table with some white things on (I should have looked more closely) What did I glean, something to do with women, unpicked clothes, carefully done, something to do with the state of the female gender. The writing doesn’t help, nor do the photo’s on the box – one has a chain in it – we can’t be in unchaining feminism territory surely. I read the Outpost interview.
She is “resistant to work that … exploits labour or power … environmentally problematic … waste[ful] … exhibition … about chemicals and the molecular or bodily and how materials are constituted or broken down” she is “interested in being closely connected to the idea of using the domestic as a gendered space”
The interviewer asks wether the work can be described as political activism, Emma doesn’t really answer but says how hard political work is, but has worked with immigration issues in Germany. She seems to think that something is a political gesture because she ‘does it’. I feel like saying GRRRRR. I think my problem with this kind of art is that arranging objects in a gallery really isn’t a political act, it is an artistic act, an act of creation but there is no metaphorical or analogical leap that I can make to see this work as political activism. Is the intention that I should think about existence of women and then … talk, act? it is so whispy, so nebulous, does she not want to be pinned down. She says in the interview that in the title of the exhibition form and foam refer to something that is not completely solid. And in a way I am glad that she refers to uncertainty – how do ‘ideas of content or politics come into questions of form’. In this exhibition, at least for me they don’t. The whole space feels introverted, turned inwards, internalised even.
I was surprised to find in my post gallery visit research that Emma Hedditch is not a recent graduate but has been making video work and curating/facilitating art production since the 1990’s. Maybe she is examining some kind of potential change in her work. Reading about what she has done over the last twenty years is much more interesting than looking at her work at Outpost.
As a post script to myself I remind myself that Outpost is ‘committed to the uncompromising presentation of contemporary art’ and I really don’t like writing so critically about somebody’s art production
