Nomenclature

A similar contrast and fusion between the texture of everyday life and the memory-laden objects of personal and timeworn ritual is a central feature of Anne Lydiat’s recent work. In sculpture, photographs and installations made over the last decade she has drawn upon the familiar and domestic and invested it with new power and depth of meaning. Working across the boundaries between the private and the public, the popular and the abstract, the material/present and the absent/past, she explores the ambivalence of apparently mundane objects – aprons, mirrors, greenhouses – and recreates them within a new kind of visual narrative.

The power of naming has traditionally belonged to those with the authority to act within and upon the world. But as Primo Levi suggests, groups on the margins have always inserted their own vocabulary, sometimes subversive, full of dark humour, within the interstices of a ruling language. Dismissed as gossip, women’s conversations – between friends, about children, partners, sex, food – may be likened to this kind of transitional speech on the border lines to which Levi refers. Indeed, an analogy can be drawn between the Jewish history of resistance through language and women’s ‘cultural otherness’ produced within, and sometimes at odds with, a dominant masculine discourse.[1] Like gossip, artwork which deals with the domestic has always occupied a lesser category of importance within the hierarchy of artistic language. By according it serious attention, Anne Lydiat’s work engages in a dialogue which connects with and challenges the position of women’s speech on the margins of discourse. Drawing on everyday objects from the domestic sphere, she interrogates their familiar placing and makes it strange. Her work addresses the ways in which gendered subjectivities are shaped, not only within language, but also in relation to the material universe which makes up our lives.

Anne Lydiat’s act of naming is at once humorous and subversive. By using familiar phrases to anchor the titles of her works she also hints at the webs of association which lie behind them. Simple images bear complex allusions yet are crystal clear in there meaning. One object which recurs in her work is the apron, a symbol of protection and of nurture that also implies the inculcation of specifically feminine domestic virtues. (On entering a girl’s secondary school I, like Anne, learnt my first lesson in domestic science by making an apron and a cap with my name embroidered on it) in an early work, Tied to my Apron Strings, 1987, Lydiat puns on the apron as a symbol of female power and childhood dependency; an apron cut out oof the canvas is still attached, like an umbilical cord, to an empty frame. In psychoanalytic terms the apron represents a transitional object, standing both for a fear of dependency on the mother and, at the same time, for the threat of the child’s separation from her. Here, the artist fives birth to her own work, a separation which must be enacted if her identity as an artis is to emerge. The tension between the feminine sphere and her chosen identity as a professional artist remains an important concern of Lydiat’s work.

But, while domesticity entraps, it can also empower. In a recent installation shown in Portugal, Anne Lydiat returns again to the theme of the apron. In Weighed Down by Tradition, 1995, three aprons are linked, their pockets filled with marble chippings from a sculptor’s workshop.  In its companion piece, Carrying on the Tradition, three canvas bags loaded with marble sit on the gallery floor. The weight of domesticity and of an inherited artistic tradition conveys a sense of belonging, of being grounded within a certain common inheritance in a forthcoming exhibition in Bratislava, Salt of the Earth, this theme becomes clearer as aprons denoting different kinds of work are tied together to represent symbols of labour. Fear of the woman artists confinement within domesticity is counterbalanced by the apron as the sign of a craft or profession – the surgeon, the smith or, indeed, the sculptor.

As always in Anne Lydiat’s work, the precise use of materials is crucial to her intention. The material quality of objects – marble, unbleached canvas, salt, lead – are centrally important in  creating a significance which is both literal and symbolic. Made of lead, the apron bears more sinister meanings, for purity also signals its obverse, danger, and ‘matter out of place’ is inherently threatening.’[2] In a sombre work entitled The Shadow Carriers from 1992, lead aprons are surrounded by thirteen mirrors, their reflecting surfaces also leaded, covered as though in the presence of death. Similarly, in Laid in Waiting, pillowed on cushions with red hatching lamps suspended above them, lie stones which will never bear life. Lead aprons, blinded mirrors and barren stones alert us to the danger of undischarged emotions, too painful to touch or see, the radioactivity of a grief still present. As in Primo Levi’s periodic table fo chemicals, material elements function as metaphors within a personal and symbolic narrative. An like Levi’s story of his life, the work is grounded in painful memory as well as in shared cultural meanings.

There are no rites of passage in contemporary culture to make still less to celebrate, the time in between childbearing and old age for women. The charting and representation of experiences of middle age has been the subject of significant recent feminist art works, for example, those of Mary Kelly and Jo Spence. For many women this is a time when identity seems lost and uyet it is also potentially, a period in which the creative self can be renewed Anne Lydiat’s sculpture addresses such themes only in oblique ways through the use of evocative materials and symbols. But in her photographs, references to the body are more insistently present, in a series of triptych pieces begun in 1991, Scissor, Paper, Stone, Lydiat’s hands are photographed against standing stones from megalithic sites in Northumbria and at Evora in Portugal. Using a technique of photographic overlay, the hands take on the phantasmic, shadowy form of ancient lichened rocks. Like the stones, they appear weathered by time and bear the marks ritual signified, for example, in the wedding ring on the left hand. The gestures of the hands are based on the child’s game of the title, suggesting a form of repetition in play which, as in ritual, has a therapeutic function.  

In Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes writes of how, in the process of mourning his mother’s death, he searched for a photograph of her which would embody both her identity and her absence.[3] In such images, Barthes argues, we are confronted with what lies beyond the fact of the photograph, the trace of a life which is no longer present. It is this present-absence that a photograph always inscribes which, according to Barthes, haunts us with its constant reminder of loss. Anne Lydiat’s photographic triptychs invoke absence in this sense, both in relation to history and to memory, but they also invoke the passing of one stage of life into another, a rite of passage which entails both loss and renewed desire.

A continuing fascination with fertility and infertility, plenitude and absence, marks Anne Lydiat’s most recent phase of work inspired by the theme of the garden.  Here, her feminist concerns are more often clothed – or perhaps concealed – in a minimalist aesthetic. She invokes personal history but disguises it within the precision of pure objects. In this respect, her formal concerns are closer to the minimalist tradition of Sol LeWitt, Agnes Martin or Donald Judd than to any presumed feminist aesthetic.  The intricacy of detail in her early works using stitching and embroidery has been replaced by a precision of construction in larger sculptural pieces like the greenhouses of Beyond the Shadow 1994. The repetition of a formal sequence of elements, an insistence on truth to materials, and a severe restriction of colour, place these works squarely within the principles of minimalism. What preserves them from the kind of sterility into which such a gallery bound aesthetic can sometimes fall, is a constant dialogue between the meaning and making of the pieces. By using vernacular objects that belong in the sphere of everyday life, the subject of Lydiat’s sculptures and installations are accessible to a wide audience and yet, simultaneously, they are distanced through their immaculate reconstruction as art.

The greenhouses are conceived in the form of a flexible installation made up of sculptural structures which exist both as solid three-dimensional objects and dislocated forms in space. Initially at least, form and content seem to be divorced. The work evokes a series of formal tensions, between instability and order, dislocation and placing movement and stasis, and between sculpture and painting.  Yet again, ‘common or garden’ objects have been defamiliarized and rendered strange.  A greenhouse which should signify. A place of light, warmth and growth is in one case covered with lead, in a second with reflecting mirror glass, and in a third is shuttered with blank panels of plywood and then turned upside down on its roof.  A fourth, painted white, hangs on the wall, deconstructed in two dimensions, its disparate parts have yet to be assembled, like a plan waiting final placement.

Inversion and deconstruction offer a key to a kind of reversal of meaning which operates in these pieces. The ‘greenhouses’ are enclosed spaces that we are unable to enter, sealed off from the light they seem sterile and impenetrable, and yet they contain emotion, in the dual sense of that which is both repressed and concealed from view. Absence of growth and fertility stand in for loss in the creative sense. This dialogue between an inner life and the life of objects, the personal and the formal, remains a central theme of her current work.

In her most recent installation, White Garden 1996 shown for the first time in Nomenclature, Anne Lydiat explores a similar terrain which lies between growth and sterility, the desire for creativity and the compulsion to order. The naming of things returns as a preoccupation, but here the labour of classification, represented by Latin names inscribed on plant labels, has no apparent purpose.  The white ‘roses’ which lie on the gallery floor have no need of identification since their endless repetition reproduces only sameness, not difference. I am tempted to read in these works a reference to genetic technology, to the cloning of identical genes which has its origins in the gardeners’ desire to reproduce plants without the accidents of nature. Finding an apt metaphor in the garden, Nomenclature reminds us of the intricate borderline between human compulsion fort control (of nature, desire, emotion, the female) and surrender to its sweet disorder.

Rosemary Betterton (1996)

[1] Elizabeth Grosz, ‘Judaism and Exile: The Ethics of Otherness’, New Formations, 12, 1990:81

[2] Mary Douglas, ‘Purity and Danger: An analysis of the concepts of pollution and taboo, Routledge 1991:35

[3] Roland Barthes, ‘Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. Fontana 1984§