Domestic Fetishes

ARTIST STatement

Artist Resumé

CATALOGUE PDF

Video

Installation: Kootenay Gallery of Art

August 28 - October 31, 2020 (1300 square feet)

Detail: Pistols

These are my iPhone images in the studio…. All Previous by Jeremy Addington

Notes about influence and ambitions: my work in general and Domestic Fetishes, in particular

Since 1986 when I received a Canada Council Explorations grant to write and make work I veered away from fine craft to wanting to say something more with the materials I used.

Arte Povera artists like Tapies, Kounellis, Burri have interested me a lot.

Gedi Sibony, a generation or two younger than me is interested/influenced similarly, it seems and I’ve been following him. Other than Marisa Merz there were no women arte povera artists who anyone paid any attention to. I’m sure they were there and now lost to us. The reason we know of Marisa is that her husband, Mario Merz, was an artist who people paid attention to.

And so in the spirit of Eva Hesse and Louise Nevelson I have been making work that is poor in its intentions and materials. The materials have been from the institution of the family, the domestic sphere as seen through the eyes of a labouring, in all senses of the word, woman. Arte Povera artists were coming out of the Second World War and they were men using cloth in new ways. Burri understood the use of gauze as a physician. Marisa Merz might have seen it as press for fruit to make jelly. I saw a Kounellis installation in summer 2019 in Venice at the Fondazione Prada and was amazed at the audacity of the furniture installed on the ceiling of a 13th century crumbling palace. It was grand.

My intentions are grand but my materials are poor, as are my resources, but I don’t think that should stop me from expressing what I think of as the poor and ordinary, and sometimes sacred, experiences of domestic life. The use of silk is as rich as it gets in this work and it comes from a worm which I think it quite lovely and appropriate. This sanctity is not the kind that is condoned by a religion. And heaven knows there are plenty of crimes committed in personal domiciles. The sanctity that I’m after is the kind of appreciation for existence, however it may present itself, in the contemplative, in peace, in solitude.

Domestic Fetishes is meant to express something like a twenty first century, feminine, art povera sensibility.

Notes on the Use of White

White: Influenced in this regard by Edmund de Waal, ceramicist and writer, and Kenya Hara, Japanese graphic designer, curator and writer.

Edmund de Waal - The White Road: Journey into an Obsession

Kenya Hara - White

For me, use of white is in a spiritual way the concept of emptiness at the beginning and end of life lived in the senses, as described by Olafur Eliasson in his blurb on the book White.

For Hara whiteness in objects is explored as a part of Japanese sculpture. He mentions that white occurs at the beginning and end of life in the egg and the bone (bleached after death) and marks a spiritual aspect of life.

I think this has a resonance for me and has influenced me in another way. I began my adult life as a nurse. As a student nurse I was most interested and amazed at birth and death. As a grad nurse I worked with dying patients at times.

As a mother, informed by my work as a registered nurse, I was aware of the process of giving birth as a teeter-totter between life and death. Birth is a crapshoot even though most often it goes well. A lack of oxygen at a critical time and a baby may be born with disability or die. The mother may bleed out after the birth. Even in modern hospitals it can happen. Puerperal fever or childbed infection commonly killed new mothers in the first 10 days post partum until antibiotics were available.

Anyway, this is maybe a feeble attempt to explain to some small degree my obsession with the use of white. I’ve decided to indulge it until I get over it.

For some of the sculptures and some of the panels I’ve used a “magic paste” made of household paint primer and PVA. I was influenced in this by Cy Twombly’s sculptures. He used household paint and glue. And I loved them. His were elegiac in nature and perhaps mine are too but not in as direct a manner. His materials were often humble – cardboard boxes and plastic flowers sometimes. You gotta’ love it!

I aspire to be a rude Gathie Falk…