Cathy Wilkes. Sculpting Intimacy
Glasgow-based Cathy Wilkes (b. 1966, Belfast) creates enigmatic sculptural tableaux made of life-sized figures frozen in introspective poses. In the run-up to the artist’s new project for the British Pavilion at the 2019 Venice Biennale, Sara Cluggish delves into Wilkes’ complex practice and works, described by the artist as an emotionally charged “process of letting go.”
For over twenty-five years Cathy Wilkes has produced diffuse sculptural arrangements that are equal parts alluring and confounding. Wilkes’ works combine figurative sculpture with (mostly) abstract paintings and domestic objects plucked from the artist’s home. Pulling from this variety of categories, her installations blur boundaries between the unique and the massproduced, the rarefied and the mundane. Life-sized figures stand frozen in introspective poses – looking towards the ground or staring blankly into the distance, creating an alluring, mysterious effect often described as theatrical or allegorical for the hidden stories and meanings their illusory gestures might imply but do not fully fix. These striking tableaux have the effect of still, fragmented moments that speak broadly to life’s transitional junctures of motherhood, birth and death, as well as the feelings of love and loss that such events bring forth.
This year, the Northern Irish artist has been selected by the British Council to represent Great Britain at the 2019 Venice Biennale, notably the third woman in a row to do so. The presentation is curated by Zoe Whitley, curator of international art at the Tate Modern. This is not the first time the artist takes center stage at this major international art event, however. In 2005, Wilkes filled the Scottish Pavilion of the 51st Venice Biennale with the work She’s Pregnant Again, a title which sounds like it could be a good bit of gossip intimately relayed from one friend to another. Actually, this installation, boldly and publicly, announced Wilkes’ persona as a mother and caregiver. The presentation consisted of a single installation comprising televisions, aluminum trays, water, petrol, sink, towel, phone, salad bowls, mirror, jar, saucer, shoe, fabric, thread and paintings. The work label reads like a stream of consciousness-cum-shopping list. As in the case of many of Wilkes’ installations, She’s Pregnant Again carries the artist’s personal material history, though the encounter with the work does not exclusively hinge on an autobiographical reading. While the artist’s biography certainly matters in the case of She’s Pregnant Again, Wilkes has said of other works: “there is no (…) need for someone to fully understand (…) through contemplation and communion, all objects can become transcendental. From some perspective, I could even conceive of the continuity of everything.” In this way, there is no hierarchy between the materials in Wilkes’ installations. The paintings – which she makes at a slow pace, often working into the canvas, setting it aside, scrubbing pigment away, working into the surface again, and so forth – carry the same weight and status as her various readymade objects, each element harmoniously contingent on the next. Often displayed directly on the floor, the installations are arranged to generously allow space for viewers to wander in and amongst them, “communing” with each element at close range.
Non-Verbal (2005), produced in the same year as She’s Pregnant Again, has a less boisterous title but includes many of the same materials – a television, a salad bowl, a pram and paintings. Newly included are two lean, female shop mannequins with perky breasts, their arms gingerly positioned back at their sides, one leg