Reveal and Conceal

by Hettie Judah

My piece of sculpture (usually figures) 

do not represent only study in forms. They 

represent emotional states usually of a painful kind – such as… impending engulfment  (under water) a very old theme. 

Louise Bourgeois (Psychoanalytic Writings, c.1958)

 

Laura Ford’s sculpture invites us to respond to and  acknowledge our animal self – the self that reveals  itself in our unbidden thoughts, in disinhibited drunk  behaviour, or moments of overwhelming emotion. This  instinctive, un-edited version of ourselves is one that  we associate with childhood: those years in which raw  sensory response to situations can consume the body.  In the arena of non-verbal communication, there are  few things as starkly eloquent as a toddler’s tantrum,  a young child skipping down the street, or the hunched  shoulders of an adolescent sulk. 

 

The children and animals that populate Ford’s  sculptural universe are neither children, nor  animals, precisely: they perform instead as  avatars for feelings or states of various kinds.  Ford is often associated with feminist artists of  an earlier generation – notably Kiki Smith and  Paula Rego – but their casts of birds, beasts and  human characters are used to very different ends.  Where Smith explores the symbolic and mystic  vocabulary of various cultures, and Rego the dark  and redemptive powers of fable and fairy tale, you  need no knowledge of art historical symbolism to  understand Ford’s work. Whether animal or human,  her figures instead speak to us at an instinctive  level. With the faces masked, or cloaked in elaborate  costumes, they are reduced to a kind of raw abstract  personhood. We read Ford’s sculptures as we read  the body language of living humans, checking for  signs of stress, fear, anger, shame or anxiety in the  way that they hold themselves and relate to other  figures in a group. 

 

The lower space at East Quay hosts what seems  to be a motley array of children in masquerade.  Some wear animal costumes – a frog, an octopus  and a pink poodle – albeit these are animals with  the simplified cartoonish quality of plush toys. They  might have wandered away from a birthday party  or school play but while their outfits are festive, their  demeanour is anything but. The little pink octopus  appears isolated and lost in thought, while the frog  and poodle are watching anxiously. Ford made this  trio for a public exhibition in Cardiff in 2016: they were  positioned in a glass shopfront looking out toward  other figures positioned on the wall of Cardiff Castle.  At Watchet, they are reimagined within a huddle  of figures manifesting intense emotional states.  

 

Two Love/Hate Girls (2014) hide behind balaclavas,  their pockets filled with miniaturised versions of  themselves, as though trapped within a hall of  mirrors. Three Sorrow Filled Cats (2014) dressed in  bonneted Victorian capes give the mournful big-eyed  stare of a manipulative pet soliciting treats. Pale Fat  Ghosts (2019) weeps extravagantly as she grasps a  pair of demon dolls to her chest, as though inviting  them to communicate on her behalf.  

 

In these unabashed public displays of feeling we are  party to something that might otherwise remain  private – Ford’s figures are physically costumed and  masked, but emotionally naked – such is the ‘reveal’  of the exhibition’s title. Children and animals are a  useful cypher for Ford precisely because we consider  them to be open and honest.  

 

Michel Foucault’s study of prisons, schools and  military structures Discipline and Punish (1977)  includes an Eighteenth Century engraving of a  twisted oak sapling lashed to a stout pole, forcing  it into an upright position. Foucault found the  engraving in an orthopaedics manual: the tree  was intended to suggest a child’s body, and the  straightening that could be achieved with corrective  restraints. But it also became a useful metaphor for  psychological control, and a system of education  and discipline that forcefully trains the developing  mind and body. The end goal of such a system is  to bring the subject to a state of docility in which  it internalises and reproduces the controlling  imperative, and compliantly polices its own (and  others’) actions. 

The lashed tree in Discipline and Punish is the  spiritual forebear of Ford’s Espaliered Girls (2007)  – child figures in which the upper half resembles  a violently pruned and disciplined fruit tree.

 

At  East Quay, Ford has positioned her Espaliered Girls  before the other figures like a living fence. Having  themselves been submitted to a violent form of  control, the trained tree figures in turn exert control  over their peers. Part of the social conditioning  we receive in the transition between childhood  and adulthood is to rein in – or at least hide – our  feelings. Such is the control that the Espaliered Girls  are attempting to exert over the other sculptures. In  keeping the group contained along the back wall of  the gallery, branching arms extended, the Espaliered  Girls prevent us getting dangerously close to feelings  that have apparently slipped beyond the limits of  social acceptability.  

 

Different revelations and concealments are  underway upstairs. A new series of watercolours  picture cats in various states of submersion. They  are, at first glance, comic. The urge to laugh at feline  behaviour seems to be near-universal: a cat video that’s funny in Yokohama will also raise a chuckle in  Yeovil. There isn’t much material stuck to the walls  of Ford’s studio, but of the two pictures taped up  when I visited this spring, one was a reproduction of  a painting by Paolo Uccello, and the other was a cat  meme. We find cat videos funny because it’s hard  to resist anthropomorphising domestic animals.  Cat expressions and positions can seem uncannily  reminiscent of human response: to us they might  appear content, confused, louche, manic, humiliated,  furious or affectionate. In attributing such feelings  to feline companions we experience an enriched  relationship with our pets. But really, who knows  what’s going on in those little cat minds?  

 

Ford’s painted cats are absolutely  anthropomorphised: they are experiencing human  feelings. The water in these paintings is an alien  element, one that cats legendarily dislike, and  they are responding to their immersion in a variety  of ways. Ford worked on these paintings during  lockdown, and they explore the disconcerting  impact of months of enforced isolation. There  is a whole broth of feelings at play here from  anxiety to luxuriance. In many, the cat seems to  be submitting to something that it does not enjoy,  yet nevertheless accepts dutifully. As with the  costumes worn by the childlike sculptural figures,  the water becomes a masking device, so that we  can never see both body and face. In many pictures,  the head and paws stick out above the waves as  though the cat were looking at us over a painted  screen, a sense of artifice enhanced by more-or-less  stylised rendering of the water. 

 

The artist has described these works exploring a  mind-body separation: these are beings divided  between the two elements of water and air. This  separation might permit a transcendence of  limitations, and the ability to thrive in adverse  circumstances. Or conversely it might manifest in  the mind misbehaving (as it so often does), offering  dark thoughts in light times. 

Describing the female orgasm, we often reach for  the language of water: we talk of feelings washing  over us, ripples of pleasure, waves of sensation,  liquid merging. Such are the invisible floods engulfing  the three large Jesmonite cats on the gallery floor.  Describing the work, Ford referenced the ground breaking book on women’s health and sexuality Our  Bodies, Ourselves (1970)4 and its description of the  complex, concealed structure of the clitoris and  related erogenous zones. In learning about sexual  response, women are often invited to imagine these  areas as a visible, exterior shape – the US sculptor  Sophia Wallace has based the forms of her Swan series on the hidden structure of the clitoris. Ford  has instead imagined this felt presence in terms of  phantom limbs, which for the sculpted cats manifest  as vast bushy tails to be endlessly pursued, but  seldom caught. One of the Jesmonite cats in the  upper gallery is in the process of vigorously chasing  her tail: the other we find reclining in a daze, having  apparently just succeeded in catching hers. 

 

We might find Ford’s sculptures funny, or cute, and  that’s part of their dynamic. Scale has an impact on  how we respond to them. Ford has made sculpture  at an ‘adult’ size – the satirical A King’s Appetite (2017) included a grotesque Donald Trump-like  Prince Regent lamenting his ailing giraffe – but those  perform in a different way. We feel more comfortable  approaching figures that we read as childlike: we let  our guard down. They may be uncanny, but they are  not immediately threatening. Ford appeals to our  humour and our sympathy to lure us into engagement  with her work. Rather like the soft costumes that  clothe her hard sculptures, she eases us into a close  encounter with feelings and other phenomena we  might otherwise find distinctly discomforting. 

 

In Conversation 

 

Hettie Judah: How have you addressed the gallery  spaces at East Quay? 

Laura Ford: They’re both long spaces. Downstairs has  a big wall which you can see from outside. I wanted  to use that for a wall-based work, but one that  came out of the wall. I’m layering up lots of older and  new sculptures, like a school photo of these various  characters. In front of them will be the Espaliered Girls

HJ: Are you taking a different approach in the  upper gallery?  

LF: Very different. That started off from watercolours  I was doing. In a way the watercolours are about  a mind-body separation. You’ve got this cat which  is painted quite differently when it’s out in the  world, not in the water: it’s much more present and  it’s watching you and it’s aware of you. We don’t  really know what’s going on underneath the water.  Sometimes it’s sensual and they look like they’re  enjoying it, and sometimes it looks like ‘get me out of  here! This is not where I’m used to being!’ They’ve all  got very different emotional feelings about them. 

 HJ: And that led into a series of sculptures? 

LF: I have made lots of cats in the past but these  cats have got kind of phantom limbs. I think of them  as a kind of erogenous zone: what it would be like  if suddenly you had this big tail you were trying to  catch? This orgasm that you were trying to have? It could be read like that, or it could just be read like a  silly cat that has just caught its tail.  

 HJ: There’s always that dynamic between the first  glimpse of your work, and what you start to sense  afterwards. You can see things that look like they  might belong to a fairy tale realm, that have cuteness  and appeal. But there’s something else going on. Here  we have an exhibition where, on the ground floor  we’ve got all these children lined up and the upper  floor is full of paintings and sculptures of cats - but  it’s not a show about kids or cats.  

LF: That’s right. But what do you think it is? 

 HJ: There’s obviously something uncanny about a  mute figure of a child. And there are a lot of anxieties  connected to the different figures and the different  ways that they’re masked: they’re all in different  ways masked or adopting a persona or, indeed in  many, a selection of masks.  

LF: When I was growing up, I had some very tough  uncles, and a mother that used to have depressions,  and she’d get cross. She was fantastic except you had  to watch her emotionally and watch for the ups and  downs. The whole family was like that. You had to  read the whole family really quickly: What’s the mood  today? Where are the shoulders? How is the mouth  set? I think we all do that subconsciously: walking  down the road, to work out whether you’re safe, or  whether somebody’s drunk and they’re going to come  at you. That’s embedded in the works.  

HJ: With all the masking there’s also an element of  performance.  

LF: In around 1983, ‘84, I started doing a lot  of performances with Annie Griffin. We were  obsessed with Pina Bausch - what I loved about  her performances was that there was quite a lot of  repetition. Characters would come on, do the clucking  of the chicken noise or whatever, and you really didn’t  know what was going on. Usually, it would build and  build and build, and then you’d have a very strong  emotional response to the end of it: you understood  it emotionally and then you could unpick it. What we  also loved in those performances was the humour:  they were quite funny. Now that Bausch is dead, I  think they play it for laughs, but back in those days  you were too afraid to laugh, it was too upsetting  to laugh. There was an awful lot of tension around  those performances. I think I learnt a huge amount  from her, and I still think about her and the way she  constructs things now.  

HJ: It feels like the figures have got mechanisms to  feel that they’re safe and contained. 

LF: Yes, or again, masked. I think the little figures  behind are quite histrionic. They’re feeling those  things, whereas the Espaliered Girls in the front are  trying to stop them.  

HJ: You have made espaliered women in the past.  Where does this motif come from in your work? 

LF: We had a small garden in Kentish Town and I  started trying to espalier apple trees against the wall,  and I realised I was being quite brutal to them and  had to really cut them back and tie them and train  them. I was thinking, ‘God, it’s like my children! I can’t  do that: I can’t cut them back and I can’t train them  against the wall.’ I started thinking about the way  

they train you at school, the way you’re brought up,  the things that form you.  

HJ: It’s interesting how having been formed  by discipline, the Espaliered Girls become the  disciplinarians.  

LF: Yes, that’s true. The show’s called Reveal and  Conceal, and what they’re concealing is things that  are revealing, so there is this sort of curtain that  comes down.  

HJ: With all the different doll-like elements and masks  and the extra heads going on, there’s a suggestion  of play but the child figures don’t seem particularly  playful: it’s more as though they’re balancing multiple  personalities.  

LF: Yes. When you listen to your mind chattering,  these are the little voices you might hear: they’re the  different elements of personality.  

HJ: You are using figures from a few different series. 

LF: There are two little rock-throwing girls. They have  ‘love’ and ‘hate’ written on them and they’re quite  aggressive. The octopus was in a show in Cardiff,  looking out over the road, because over the road were  some kids dressed up as animals creeping over the big  Cardiff Castle wall. They were looking at it in a very  worried way because they knew what Cardiff was  like on a Saturday night. I find it fascinating that you  make a work that’s site specific and that has various  meanings and that you can take it somewhere else  and it does something else. I like that aspect: it’s  playful as well.  

HJ: It was really interesting that in your studio, you  only had two images pinned to the wall: one was  Paolo Uccello and the other was a cat meme. It’s the  sublime to the ridiculous.  

LF: Yes, high and low.  

HJ: Do you do pictorial research?  

LF: I do. Actually, a lot of stuff used to come out  of reading novels, but not at the moment. At the  moment I’m just looking at pictures of things: I’m not  sure I’d call it research. 

HJ: Do you search out images of people getting drunk  in car parks, and that kind of thing? 

LF: Yes, I definitely do that. I think a lot of these cat  things have come out of listening to Thundercat. That  album called Drank is all about him getting wasted.  It’s a fantastic album, about leaving your worries  at the club and just being out of it. That will spark  thoughts about what’s it like to be a woman at a club,  out of control like that. Can you do it still, and do you  get judged for it?  

HJ: You mentioned earlier that the cats series came  out of ideas you had during lockdown? 

LF: Maybe it was slowing down, maybe it was just  being in some states of anxiety, but maybe some  states where there was actually pleasure. Being in a  place that you’re unfamiliar with. They’re to do with  safety or danger, going with things, fighting, trying  to get above water, going under the water, all of  those feelings associated with the time. Should I be in  panic? Or should I go: ‘Well, fuck it.’?  

HJ: Again, the water becomes a masking device but  for the body rather than the head.  

LF: Yes. And is it pleasure that’s being felt in the body,  with the face not giving much away? Or is it actual 

terror? What happens when you get into a pond  where there’s lots of weeds lapping around your legs?  HJ: Even as they’re dealing with quite heavy stuff,  there’s a comic element as well.  

LF: Yes, there always is, because everything is always  slightly ridiculous.  

HJ: Does the humour become an ambassador for  talking about more difficult things?  

LF: Yes, it’s fantastic for that, isn’t it? One of my  favourite little clips is [comedian] Paul Whitehouse  being a Welshman: he’s going to be interviewed  by an Englishman. The Englishman comes up to  his gate and he says: ‘You can’t come in here, only  Welsh people are allowed, no Englishmen!’ And the  Englishman goes: ‘Oh, sorry, sorry!’ And he says: ‘No,  I’m only joking with you!’ and he brings him in and  makes him feel warm, and then he does something  else. He’ll keep bringing him in, then being really mean  to him and messing with him. That’s what I like to do  with the work.  

HJ: So you comfort people and then you slightly  terrify them and then you comfort them? 

LF: Yes, exactly.  

HJ: You hit them with the cuteness and then the  weirdness and then the humour… 

LF: …and the sweetness, and bits you recognise, and  bits that hold you and then bits that push you away  as well.  

HJ: You were saying earlier that some people have  had quite strong objections to your work?  LF: Well, the work makes you feel things, and if you’re  feeling angry or vulnerable, then you might have a  very strong reaction to it. You might want to close it  down for all sorts of reasons. At the end of the 1990s,  there was a strong resistance to any kind of narrative.  I don’t think my work is narrative at all: there’s no  linear story being told, no fairy tale. But somehow  the work wasn’t intellectual enough or it was in that  arena of ‘girls’ stuff’, so it was pushed out.  HJ: Because it was talking about women’s desire?  LF: A woman’s experience, yes.  

HJ: And also response to children?  

LF: Yes, all of those things.  

HJ: It’s difficult stuff to talk about and it’s certainly  not very accepted in the art world! When you were  working on performance, were you looking at mask  work at all? Jacques Lecoq was very fashionable in  

that era. I remember doing mask workshops: you  wear a blank mask and the position of the body would  tell you so much.  

LF: Which is amazing. But no, I didn’t do any mask  work. When I was at art school, we had to write two  theses, and one of them I did on fairground shows,  partly because nobody had written about fairground  shows, and partly because I was quite dyslexic and  there were no books, which was fantastic for me. I  wrote a load of what were probably fantasies, lies,  but I had done some research: I’d gone to see old  relatives, like a guy who had the last boxing show left  on earth. They all embroider their stories, so it was a  great thesis. He used to talk about the winter being  the time you’d get artists in to paint up the front of  the shows to get people in, to entice them. On the  fairground every year we’d try to make the arcade  

look flashier and more interesting. There’s quite a big  element of that in my work: What’s going to arrest  the eye? And then once you’ve got your audience,  what are you going to do with them?  

HJ: Peter Blake is obsessed with fairground art. 

LF: There used to be lots of fairground shows as well  and they were always amazing. When I was little I  used to go to Neath Fair and my grandmother would  take me around the sideshows: people dressed up as  things or women in bikinis covered in gold paint lying  in glass cases of rats.  

HJ: More like an American carnival?  

LF: Yes. You’d get these things that look like  sculptures but they weren’t, and they’d chase you out  of the booth. That was quite influential, I think. 

HJ: Most of your sculptures look like they could spring  to life and get up to something.  

LF: Yes, definitely. Every kid has imagined that’s what  their toys do.  

 

About East Quay 

East Quay is a brand new arts venue in Watchet,  West Somerset. It is home to contemporary  art galleries, artist studios, a paper mill, a  print studio, a restaurant, an education space,  and accommodation pods. It is run as a social  enterprise that seeks to signal how community led renewal can empower people, help them to  develop agency and rebuild a local economy in a  turbulent and uncertain global context. Please visit  our website to learn more about our programme of  exhibitions and events. This exhibition is generously  supported by Arts Council England.  

eastquaywatchet.co.uk 

 
September 6, 2022