Introduction // Background // Theory and Context // Methods // Discussion i. Bodies and Buildings // The Pleating Papers // Discussion ii. Spaces and Voices // Other Stories // Conclusion // References and Image List

Discussion i.

Bodies & Buildings

From the flat sheet, perhaps the key to the relationship between sculptural and spoken narratives in my work lies in architecture. Or rather, as Bal might argue, in architecturality. It is the architectural qualities of a sculpture, its state of being building and not building, which allow it to evade singular narratives and straightforward readings of meaning. It thereby occupies a state of flux, a state of becoming, suspended in animation. Bal proposes architecture as a meeting point between visual art and narrative, asserting that in Bourgeois’ work,

architecture is invoked, explored, and contested; it is critically engaged and brought to bear on the sculpture within which it is put forward […] the mediating term that glues experimental sculpture to the threshold of architecture in Bourgeois’ work is ‘narrative’.1

The architectural qualities of a sculpture invoke a sense of the recognisable, stories we remember from our own personal experiences, but also more immediately experiential narratives in the meeting of sculpture and viewer in space. This description could also be applied to my own work. Architecturality could be the bridge between the different forms of storytelling, the sculptural and the spoken, that I am exploring.

For the notion of the architecturality of narrative, the scale of a sculpture is important. In Bourgeois’ work there is something in the transformation of a tiny and recognisable living thing into a huge creation that gives Spider the qualities of the architectural. Bal suggests that:

the legs of spiders, blown up on a Bourgeoisian scale, are sturdy columns […] they become the skeleton of a house […] Having become architectural in size, they become architectural in essence; the body is a building […] The building is a body. Here memory comes in, spinning the stories that allow the spider to grow big enough to be a building.2

Conversely, in my work, when scaled down from architecture, certain forms or materials ordinarily seen on buildings become body-like as we project ourselves beneath, inside, or in place of these ‘buildings’ or ‘bodies’. In both cases, it is our imagination and memory, when confronted with these transitional objects, familiar in form yet unfamiliar in scale, which project us inside the building or allow us to take the place of the body. This sense of awareness, of being in space, is what Maurice Merleau-Ponty termed the ‘phenomenology of perception’.3 Art critic Rosalind Krauss expounds this as the temporal experience of material reality, in which the bodily effort required to move around serves as a reminder of the passing of time, the temporality of experience. Perception of these sculptures activates a preobjectival sense:4 by looking around and ahead at the same time as moving, the viewer experiences where they are but also where they will or could be, as well as engaging memories of where they have been before. This adds depth to Bal’s view that ‘narrative is a function of Bourgeois’ architecture because she infuses form with memory’, defining narrative as the ‘medium of temporality’ and thereby architecturality as ‘the systematic counterpart of architecture, the emblem of spatiality’.5

Steven Connor explored the relationship between buildings and bodies in his 2004 lecture at the Bartlett School of Architecture. For Connor, the relationship between buildings and bodies is inextricable, yet often overlooked:

A dense lattice of anthropomorphic figures and fancies connects buildings to bodies. One metaphorical strain will construe the body as a fabric, an edifice, a temple, a structure that holds together, tenement, and that lifts, eminence. In Old English, the body is a ‘banhus’, or ‘bone house’. The flesh is clay, as many buildings are. Our contemporary talk of the discursive ‘construction’ of the body may mean to dissolve the body’s fleshy immediacy, but does so only to replace it with the notion of the blueprint, a structure built according to a plan or projection. It is a surprise that etymology does not in fact verify the sense that there is a connection between a body and an abode, through a shared notion of ‘abiding’ or dwelling.

Reciprocally, buildings are said to be like bodies. Windows are not just the eyes of the soul, they are the eyes – the ‘wind-eyes’ – of the house. Buildings have faces (façades), wings, fronts and backs, and outsides, which we nowadays call skins. Buildings sweat, age, excrete. And they respire.6

In my work, roofing felt used as sculptural material takes on new meaning as skin and shelter, container and architecture, body and surface. Body becomes building and building becomes body.

Something strange happens in the perception of volume in my folded sculptural forms that keeps viewers distant yet invites them inside, and connotes both home and banishment by the material’s intended use as waterproofing for garden sheds and industrial buildings. It is a protective skin, yet abrasive to the touch of human skin. It is alluring, looks soft, yet scratches layers off my fingers as I work. It engages its own architecturality; it is narrative made intimate yet more obscure. Pleats are folded by hand and stitched into place, an absurdly laborious method of joining. Avoiding traditional heat-fusing roofing methods, I maintain architectural qualities without the work becoming architecture. Silk thread, though delicate, is stronger than the roofing material itself, and will tear it if joined sections are pulled apart. These stitches invoke cobwebs and dusty corners; they are strong and full of secrets, both ‘unheimlich’7 and familiar. The folds themselves play a part in the story or atmosphere of the work, in the unstable phenomenological gesture by which they invite the viewer inside but also seem to hide or conceal — they are welcoming yet secretive; narrative nooks and crannies; ambiguous architectural spaces.

Though I often begin with a grid of pleats or folds, materials behave differently. Like characters in a story, some are soft, some stubborn, while some are scratchy and others more easily swayed. Roofing felt can push forwards and pull back, take on organic shapes or change when moved. Metal, also used in architecture and roofing, needs to be folded mechanically but holds its new form. Metal connotes skin or shelter as armour or protective plate, portable architecture worn on the body. There is a violent paradox in roofing felt or metal used in this way: it is both armour/protection and weapon/assailant. The bodily effort of creating these skins/shelters is considerable: my muscles ache, the material is heavy, it scours my skin and makes holes in my fingers. It is a kind of wrestling match, whereby the fine craft skills of the fashion atelier or artist’s studio and the heavy labour of the building site are combined. Yet this is a mutual attack: I pierce holes in the roofing material with needles, hammer metal and scratch its surface with brutish machines. The inherent violence in the making process echoes too the aforementioned ‘injurious speech’8 of which Judith Butler writes.