Jigsaw Woman by Mathew Weir
In André Bretons semi-autobiographical novel Nadja, he recalls “…MAISON ROUGE consisted of certain letters arranged in such a way that when seen from a certain angle in the street, the word MAISON disappeared and ROUGE read POLICE”. This word play - the deconstruction and reordering of language - was one of the many surrealistic games so loved by Breton. Another game that he would play with fellow poets, writers and artists was the now well-known Exquisite Corpse. The drawing game involving the folding of paper as each individual person secretly adds a part, only to reveal at its end the monstrous and entertaining creations that resulted.
Abigail Lane’s exhibition Heads & Tails at The Art Station plays with similar arrangements and rearrangements, where things appear and disappear, move from visible to invisible, where tricks and illusions are everywhere. Not only is it the aesthetics of magic that influence Abigail and this exhibition but the ordinary objects and props used to perform magic - the “magicians toolbox”, as she calls it. The invisible techniques and sleight of hand employed by the magician whose purpose is to transform, delight and entertain, can be seen throughout many of her works.
Felt underlay lines the entrance and corridors of The Art Station's former post office and telephone exchange building. Displayed on top of this material are a number of open boxes with bars. These hold captive a variety of embroidered British birds, the extended threads being the only parts that break free. A soundtrack of birdsong plays in the background, yet this has been overlaid with the crashing of pots and pans, the clapping and cheering taken from BBC sound footage during the covid pandemic. This exhibition is Abigail Lane’s. The unique manipulation of the environment and sensory experience proves this and sets the scene. But she has also chosen to invite three guest artists providing subtle interventions and disruptions. Perhaps Glenn Brown, Gavin Turk and myself were also chosen as a psychological way out of her own work, to serve as distraction and decoy when needed.
The Zig Zag Lady series, consisting here of five freestanding sculptures, act like Breton’s 'Mason Rouge' and the game of Exquisite Corpse. We see the suggestion of bodies; holes, legs, heads, hands and feet. These motifs appear and re-appear in much of Abigail’s work throughout the exhibition and when combined with the apparel of human presence such as shirts, boots, shoes and jumpers, they act as a stand-in for the body. At times, nature and the body alarmingly become one: acorns are eyes, boots become feet or vice versa. Often clothing has been embroidered, making it part readymade, part modification, a process we also see in the choice of materials; fabric, wool and string, glass eyes, wax and a blackbird’s nest. The list seems endless, always incorporating and adding new features.
Abigail Lane, Zig Zag Lady (Has been) including appropriation of guest artist Gavin Turk's Spent Match (Ed 9/40), 2005. Zig Zag Lady (Has been) 2022 / 170 x 82 x 40cm. Plywood, Perspex sheet, brass wire, glass eye, plaster and house dust casts, stretched calico, black cotton, curtain, fishnet tights, shoes, stretcher bars and painted bronze. Copyright the artist. Photo Doug Atfield.
It is our relation to the sculptures, our angle, that determines how and what we see. Stacks of what appear to be balancing wooden crates are viewed from one position, while from another these open up to a diorama of sorts. They are sculptures to be walked around and looked into. It’s not just how they are seen - our point of view - it’s also what is seen, the details within these boxes, details for which Abigail is willing to risk the idea that something may be missed or not seen. What matters is that these details are present, however hidden or concealed, the way in which the small parts make up the whole. They are visually complex, a collage of imagery, of nature and the body, reconfigurations of the human form that still appear to acknowledge the three basic sections of top, middle and bottom.
These rearrangements of the body are echoed in Abigail’s use of word play and anagrams, a key part of her practice. Maybe it’s possible to view much of the work in a similar way - as a breaking up and reordering, then a putting back together again in a new way. After all, this is also something of how a life can be and often lived. One Zig Zag Lady work has the subtitle - MissALaneous. Miss A Lane / miscellaneous - a group or collection of something made up of different kinds. The detritus from a hoover bag, a group of friends, body parts. The signature of a person who is anonymous. To Zig Zag is also to avoid or to dodge. A notorious Second World War double agent called Eddie Chapman was given the code name ‘Agent Zig Zag’ for exactly that reason: as the historian and author Ben Macintyre puts it, “so named because they were never entirely certain whose side he was on. If a man could zig, he could always zag”.
These sculptural works of Abigail Lane’s were inspired by Robert Harbin’s magic trick ‘Zig - Zag Girl’, where a magician places - usually a woman - in a vertical cabinet of three sections, inserts blades and moves the body parts around to then reveal them rearranged and apparently disconnected yet still with the ability to move, wave and wiggle. Harbin’s trick could now be seen as, and is, a misogynistic act to contain and manipulate the female body, not forgetting that this is all done for the pleasure and amazement of an audience. While Abigail is aware of these ideas she is not setting out simply to be critical: she adopts the form, highlights how sculptural such tricks are and wonders how art and magic connect through the desire to make something appear from nothing, to disappear, to transform, to reveal, to conceal and most importantly to allow the suspension of belief.
While the magic trick is performed live on stage, Abigail’s titles for the Zig Zag Lady series give the impression of something more domestic, evoking the chauvinistic idea of a woman having a child, moving from the city to the country, the home maker under patriarchy. As their bracketed sub-titles suggest - Country Life, Has-been, She’s Febreze, Child of Chaos - these reference the home and certain stereotypes of domestic life. In this sense, the works might seem like self-portraits, but her trick is to simultaneously create escape from the domestic, moving around and outside it somehow. They are defiant, ironic and they turn self-analysis onto the viewer.
There are a series of photographs of the escape artist Harry Houdini holding and making wax casts of his own hands. He intended to reveal the falsehoods of spiritualism and to denounce it as exploiting people’s grief for money. His own wax hands were examples of “floating spirit” hands used during séances, made to uncover what he called “fraud mediums”. One of these photographs, from 1923, shows Houdini placing his enlarged, wax covered hand into a glass jar of water. In one section of Abigail’s Zig Zag Lady series, She’s Febreze, 2023, two cast arms and hands cut off just above the elbows, are viewed in an open box. One points down as if entering a certain space, an invisible or imagined substance, much like that seen in the Houdini photograph. The other pushes against the floor of the box as if the rest of the body, if seen, would be doing a handstand.
Abigail Lane, Zig Zag Lady (She’s Febreze) 2023, 170 x 72 x 40 cm. Plywood, Perspex sheets, painted jesmonite casts, embroidered pajama top, nylon washing line with pegs, cotton embroidered fabric stretched over wooden frame, painted plaster, castor wheels. Copyright the artist. Photo Doug Atfield.
There is a tension here between the two positions, one light and almost lifeless, the other, tense and rigid. Both casts, taken from her own limbs or those of a friend, are painted in what looks like the green algae of pond or river water. The arm facing down has a gradient from pink flesh colour to murky green/yellow, while the hand coming up from the base goes from the green down to a muddy brown, as if sinking into the mud of a river bed. On top of this box and seemingly caught between the boxes is the cast of a pink balloon, filled with air. I can’t help thinking of drowning, of the lungs filled with air but under pressure, ready to burst; of a body drowned by water and becoming, even transforming into, its environment; of the push and pull of life and the claiming back of life by nature. Didn’t Houdini challenge this and the capacity of his own lungs by escaping from drowning in his famous Water Torture Cell and Bridge Jump tricks?
The fusion of magic and domestic space is a theme that runs through much of Abigail Lane’s work. For a while now she has been saving dust from her home and studio and using this material to make sculptures and casts - literally turning a domestic chore into another form of work. As she has said: “you just use what you’ve got, even if that is rubbish”. This recalls Picasso’s often quoted remark about incarceration - “I would be almighty in my own world of art, even if I had to paint my pictures with my wet tongue on the dusty floor of my cell” (Der Monat, 1949). Abigail’s approach is less overstated: as dust gathers, she is busy gathering dust from the space around her. More specifically, more practically and even more matter-of factly, she does the hoovering. She does the housework that needs to be done. A mundane activity that becomes a dual game, with the idea of making something from collecting and holding onto what is usually lost or discarded. Think of Warhol being asked to participate in the 1972 exhibition ‘Art in Process’ at the Finch College Museum of Art, New York, where he vacuumed the gallery carpet and then displayed the vacuum cleaner.
Some of this dust which Abigail accumulates has been used to cast house bricks which are stamped and titled, Re-Make Re-Model. The ephemeral material of the inside is used to form an external object. She refers to the use of this material as “the ultimate self-portrait” being not just of the body but the inhabited space of that body. There are two artists to whom it could be said she has some affinity who had their own approaches and responses to dust. René Magritte complained about unsold paintings accumulating dust, a sign of inactivity and lack of success. Marcel Duchamp along with Man Ray created the photographic work Elevage de Poissière (Dust Breeding), 1920, an image of dust that had settled onto a section of Duchamp‘s Large Glass work, which he proceeded to fix to the glass with varnish later. When Francis Bacon’s studio was dismantled and moved from its location in South Kensington to the Hugh Lane Gallery in Dublin, the archivists even catalogued and re-installed its dust.
In Peter Greenaway‘s 1988 film Drowning by Numbers, a young boy named Smut has many rituals and games. He invents ‘Hangman's Cricket’ and ‘Sheep and Tides‘, with his final game being suicide: “This is the best game of all, because the winner is also the loser, and the judge's decision is always final”. Death is the subject, and the film revolves around three women and the drowning of their husbands. Each time a death occurs, be that human or animal, Smut sets off a firework. “A violent death is always celebrated by a firework”. He paints a number next to the scene to categorise and document, something Abigail is also keen to do with her own work by using boxes and plinths to capture objects behind glass or perspex, and by incorporating labels into many of her works.
A scene in the film shows in close-up Smut striking a match to light a firework following a drowning. One could see Gavin Turk’s painted bronze Spent Match, 2005, that sits at the bottom of Abigail’s Zig Zag Lady (Has-been), 2022, as a remnant of Smut’s actions. Is it the match used to light the symbolic ritual to mark a death or simply the image of a residue, a remainder like the dust that Abigail gathers so carefully in other works, transforming the leftover into a work, an act of creation?
Arsonists will often leave their matches behind, assuming that they will be lost in the flames. But to quote from Val McDermid’s book on forensics, “the powdered rock in a match head contains the fossilised remains of single-cell algae called 'diatoms'. A diatom's shell is made of silica, which is abrasive enough to help you strike the match, and tough enough to endure extremely high temperatures. Each of the 8000 known species of diatom has a unique shell structure, identifiable through a microscope. Different brands make their matches using powdered rock from different quarries. If forensic scientists can spot the diatoms, they can identify the match brand”.
This idea plays into Abigail’s desire to hold on to what can be lost; her interest in forensics, evidence and fragments. She is fascinated “in the way histories are made and crimes are detected from bits”. Greenaway’s film is also set in the Suffolk landscape, taking in the Victorian water tower and lighthouse of Southwold, not far from Saxmundham, and from Abigail’s studio and home. One can’t help feeling the work for Heads & Tails has somehow emerged out of this particular circumstance. Who would consider the image of a bird behind bars, as in her Doing Time series, if they didn’t feel a sense of entrapment? This is not taking into account the recent lockdowns and enforcement of rules due to the pandemic. Abigail makes reference between her entrapped birds and the news reports from Italy in 2020 of people singing from their balconies during this time. But Abigail Lane has always been an artist interested in escaping, magic and disappearing tricks. Maybe her move from urban Hackney to the flat East Anglian landscape was some kind of getting away. And getting out of something is always getting into something else, even in Smut’s final game, you both win and lose.
Maybe the act of making is a form of escape, to lose oneself, a displacement activity of sorts. It is telling that when walking through the first small room of The Art Station exhibition one is confronted by a coffin size box standing upright. A knitted woollen jumper hangs inside with the words Escape Artist. A confession? A warning? Get out now while there is still time! Out of what and into what?
Glenn Brown’s Drawing 6 (after Greuze/Grimaldi), 2017, makes reference to our connection to nature. If Peter Greenaway’s film focuses on death and decay in the life-cycle, then Brown’s drawing could be seen as the seed from which something is grown again. Two appropriated images from art history, a face and a tree, overlaid, rendered in exquisite line become one and at the same time oscillate between the two. One thinks of Apollo and Daphne in Ovid's Metamorphoses, Daphne turning into a laurel tree to escape the advances of a love struck Apollo. Brown himself has made references to the myth of the Green Man, the folklore motif about the cycle of life, death and rebirth. The Green Man - a face amongst shrubbery, plants and roots emanating from the mouth - is an image that can be seen in many British churches. It is not known what exactly this symbolism references but one narrative suggests that when Adam and Eve were thrown out of the Garden of Eden, they took with them seeds from the tree of good and evil. When Adam died, his son Seth planted the seeds in his father’s mouth. From this a tree grew, and this tree was used to make the cross on which Jesus was crucified.
As if in acknowledgement of this narrative, next to Brown’s Drawing 6 is Abigail Lane’s Crucifixion, 2020. Three linen panels forming the shape of a crucifixion, each embroidered with black cotton reminiscent of the fine lines of Brown’s ink drawing. In two panels, black cotton emanates from silhouetted hands, just as the wounds of Jesus’ nailed hands or wrists dripped blood. Where the loincloth would be in the usual religious iconography the third horizontal panel depicts the V-shape of a vulva. Again, threads flow like the hands making a connection between the blood of Christ and the lost blood of menstruation, while also bringing to mind the roots of a tree.
The bronze sculpture, Mole Hills, 2016, which is placed on the floor in front of both these works evoke the digging up of something, the burial or planting, life and death or again, an escape. Giving the appearance of small mounds of earth the trick is only revealed by the knowledge of the bronze materiality. This offers playfulness and also shifts our perspective. It shows that what we think we see and understand is an illusion. The apparent lightness of dirt has actual physical weight. It is heavy and our belief has been brought into question.
Installation view of Heads & Tails at The Art Station (including guest work by Glenn Brown) Abigail Lane, Crucifixion, 2020, 122 x 86 x 2.5 cm. Linen stretched onto wood frames, black cotton. Abigail Lane, Mole Hills, 2016, 38 x 33 x 14 cm and 23.5 x 20 x 75 cm, painted bronze. Glenn Brown, Drawing 6 (after Greuze/ Grimaldi) 2017, 54.5 x 45.5 cm (framed), India ink on polyester film over cardboard in frame. Copyright the artists. Photo Doug Atfield.
My drawing, Wound Man, blood on Paper, 2021, was chosen by Abigail as a guest work to be included along with 12 of her embroideries. At first I thought it would replace one of her works but instead, in a grid hang of three rows of four, it pushes the bottom right frame out of the way, which then hangs separately to one side as if trying to get away from the others (EXIT, 2022). The embroideries, again with strands of thread hanging, are stitched in red and depict the outlines of body parts.
Installation view of Heads & Tails at The Art Station (including guest work by Mathew Weir) Abigail Lane, Heads & Tails, 2021 - 2023, 12 framed embroideries, red cotton onto calico, each, 830 x 650cm. Mathew Weir, Wound Man, 2021, framed drawing. Blood onto paper, 49 x 39.5cm Doug Atfield
Mathew weir, Wound Man, blood on paper, 2021, 49 x 39.5cm framed
As Rozsika Parker notes in her study of embroidery, “Embroidery was on the one hand expected to be the place where women manifested supposedly natural feminine characteristics: piety, feeling, taste, and domestic devotion; and on the other it was the instrument which enabled a woman to obliterate aspects of herself which did not conform to femininity” (The Subversive Stitch /Embroidery and the Making of the Feminine). Abigail Lane takes these characteristics mentioned by Parker and destabilises them. She makes the stitch a tool with which to challenge and question expectations of embroidery, femininity, sexuality and so-called domestic devotion. They look like crime scenes, like the traces of evidence or erotic encounters. Bums and feet, heads and hands, are separate and isolated. They feel like part of a bigger narrative, of a life lived and what remains are the stains and spills and the fading memories. I think of the scars on my own body, by accident or design, and how these are understood within my own personal and private history and only by me. My drawing is created with my own blood and illustrates different points of pain throughout the human body, with different weapons depicted. There are parallels in both our works between the fine lines, between the uses of a needle in the creation of the works, the piercing of a surface, calico or skin and between stitches that may be needed to heal a wound.
I realise that what draws me to Abigail’s work is the residue of matter and what can be interpreted or understood from details. How something spent, gone, wasted or apparently not present might be transformed into something tangible – and how magic and games within a domestic setting can be important to escape from something or someone.
I have come to a large London library to try and finish writing this text. It is quiet, but I still find a place to isolate myself from others, from the few people tapping away on laptops. I sit in an aisle lined with books and looking up I start to read some of the titles - Forensic Medicine and Toxicology, The Jigsaw Man - The Remarkable Career of Britain's Foremost Criminal Psychologist, The Mad the Bad and the Innocent, The DNA Detectives, Insanity and the Law, Time of Death, Speaking for the Dead, Reflection in Action ... This can’t be by coincidence.