C101 Article

Edinburgh: Cathy Wilkes at Inverleith House

Cathy Wilkes: Untitled, 2002, radiator, wood parts, trays; courtesy Modern Institute

Entering this exhibition feels something like coming home to an empty house. Then, walking through the rooms, you hear a sudden whisper. An overturned tea tray becomes a hidden face, a pencil-thin piece of wood trails like an arm. This arrangement of paintings, drawings and tableau-vivant sculptures is charged with a quiet watchful presence.

There are two 'mirror image' rooms connected by a smaller room. The symmetry of the exhibition encourages a metaphysical comparison, with each room a compass leg inscribing a rhetorical circle. Both rooms contain a 'body' spelt out with carved pieces of wood and trays on the floor. Each body lies beside a dirty white radiator, of the type found in classrooms and offices. In the first room, the body has a circular brass tray for a head, and lies face down, legs awkwardly splayed. The right hand rests on an ornate silver tray. The radiator could also be interpreted as a coffin lid, with the gallery floor as an open grave and the trays as talismanic offerings. In the other room, the body is headless, but reclines face up, with one knee bent. The left hand rests on a cheap blue tin tray. In this room the body is using the radiator to lift itself upright, as if climbing up and out of the frame of our gaze.

Cathy Wilkes: Untitled, 2002, radiator, wood parts, trays; courtesy Modern Institute

The two spaces are connected by a room containing a pencil drawing of the word 'value'. Wilkes' sculptural materials are often covered in the kind of dirt that accumulates over years as things lie unused in garden sheds. These still, neglected objects are reanimated by the visible traces of her hands. Where she has polished the antique trays, a patina of fingerprints is left behind. The pale blue tray, too, has a trail of her fingertips cutting through the grime.

On the walls around each figure there are a series of small paintings of female nudes that draw upon Italian Futurist artist Boccioni's sculpture, Unique Forms of Continuity in Space, 1913. This reference is not explicitly stated, and nor is it essential for reading the piece. However, the reference does provides another way into the work. In 1910 the Futurists published a manifesto, demanding amongst other points that the 'monotonous' nude be banned as a subject for painting for ten years. Wilkes' paintings take the outline of Boccioni's minotaur figure and rework it as a series of female figures with exaggerated breasts.

The female body is the trope through which the work unfolds, providing an almost endless confluence of ideas and associations. These minimal bodies, leaping in bright lines on the canvases or sketched in pieces on the floor, offer themselves as muses or else resist interpretation. These ideas are so familiar and yet still so conflicted. What changes here is, that we are asked not only how these ideas are used, but also how these ideas use us. The work clothes itself in our response.

Sarah Lowndes is a freelance writer based in Glasgow; visiting lecturer to the Historical and Critical Studies at Glasgow School of Art, her book Social Sculpture: Glasgow 1979-2002 will be published this autumn by STOPSTOP.

Cathy Wilkes, Inverleith House, Edinburgh, May/June 2002

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