Cathy Wilkes’ care-full matter-scapes: female affects of care, feminist materiality and vibrant things

ABSTRACT

The relationship between corporeal feminism and materialisms has been addressed in a number of recently emerging writings and artistic projects. In this essay, I focus on Cathy Wilkes’ exhibition in the British Pavilion at the 58th Venice Biennale in 2019 (although I suggest rather than being a singular event, it belongs to and further evolves her overarching constellation weaving art and life together) and explore her practice of meaning-making and questioning of production of knowledge driven by non-representationalist methodology understood as an affective material inter-action. I propose that Wilkes’ practice performs embodied feminist materiality in matter-scapes activating threshold spaces in which intimate care-full encounters emerge. The figure of the threshold animates matter with/in which subjectivity is embedded and embodied, nurturing a care-full response-ability and a political responsibility in the context of patriarchal neoliberal and late-capitalist social structures marked by poverty, unpaid reproductive labour, precarity of work, refugee crisis, incomprehension and social injustice. It invokes vulnerable (resistant) transitions and liminal spaces. Wilkes’ constellations grow together through vital matter and liveability.

KEYWORDS:

• Feminist materiality
• ecology of care
• vibrancy of things
• matter
• Cathy Wilkes

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Wilkes' care-full attention to becoming and her axial practice creates transitional threshold spaces. Rather than discussing her work using terms such as an installation, performance, sculpture or landscape, I suggest ‘matter-scapes’ as lived-scapes, which captures her attention to matter and liveability, the unfolding and evolving. Matter-scapes embody continuity of self and matter. I also use the term ‘constellation’ that refers to the outlines and associative patters Wilkes creates across her exhibitions.

2 So far Wilkes’ work has been analysed in the context of memory, accretion, time, process and change (Amy 2019), women as visual signs of popular culture (Budd 2011), reproductive labour (Edmonson 2018), war traditions (Rich 2012; Johnson 2012), transfiguration (Raymond 2018), haunting assemblages exploring issues such as femininity, motherhood and sexuality referring to domesticity (Amazeen 2015; Jeffery 2005) or mourning for the value of individual handwork craft and human touch (Amazeen 2015; Jeffery 2005).

3 By ‘care-fully’ I mean ‘full of care’.

4 If we think of a literal definition of ‘care’, as a noun it means ‘attention and thoroughness’, ‘caution’, ‘worry and anxiety’, ‘a responsibility’. As a verb, it signifies concerning oneself about others or something, or being considerate and even watchful and cautious (Chambers Dictionary Online 2019).

5 It does not require protection, it articulates, ‘a different conception of embodiment and sociality within fields of contemporary power, one that engages object worlds, including both built and destroyed environments, as well as social forms of interdependency and individual or collective agency’ (Butler, Gambetti, and Sabsay 2016, 6).

6 Unframed canvases may be suggestive of economy of dirt and marginalisation. They lack heavily ornamented frames and focal lighting appreciative of Old Masters paintings so proudly exhibited in multiple museums around the world, still lacking appropriate representation of women artists who remain unnamed and unheard of.

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Basia Sliwinska

Dr Basia Sliwinska is an art historian and theorist working as a Senior Lecturer at the University of the Arts London, UK. Her research is engaged with feminist visual activism and transnational and intersectional figurations in contemporary women's art practice. Basia is currently working on a research project entitled ‘Visual Activism and Sexual Diversity in Vietnam', funded by the AHRC/GCRF Research Networking grant. Her recent publications include: solo-authored book The Female Body in the Looking-Glass: Contemporary Art, Aesthetics and Genderland (I.B. Tauris, 2016, 2018); co-edited book The Evolution of the Image: Political Action and the Digital Self (Routledge, 2018).