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dirty is too dirty and how does dirt make us feel? To confuse the contexts
I have brought trash and mud inside. I've dirtied things and put them
into clean spaces. Working with little stand-ins which reference real
life, I hope to call attention to the inseparable connection between the
physical and psychological in everyday life. -Kathryn Spence (1)
Kathryn Spence's trash pigeons and mud animals expose the delicate balance
between repulsion and desire. By using dirt and debris to make her mud
animals and trash pigeons, she disrupts the seemingly socially legitimate
order of things. Her work underlines anthropologist Mary Douglas's assertion
that dirt isn't objectively defined but rather is socially constructed.
It is, simply, matter out of place. Douglas explains, "Shoes are
not dirty in themselves, but it is dirty to place them on the dining-table;
food is not dirty in itself, but it is dirty to leave cooking utensils
in the bedroom, or food bespattered on clothing; similarly, bathroom equipment
in the drawing room; clothing lying on chairs; out-door things in-doors
… In short, our pollution behaviour is the reason which condemns
any object or idea likely to confuse or contradict cherished classifications."
(2) As we know all too well, clothes become laundry (dirt) when we strip
them from our bodies and drop them on the floor. Clothing can become dirt
simply by virtue of its changed position in time and space. By bringing
dirt and trash indoors—and inverting the process so that dirt becomes
sacred object—Kathryn Spence comments on how clean and unclean are
socially transcribed and understood. She knows that we understand dirt,
in its most comprehensive sense, both psychologically and corporeally.
"I have used mud to … suggest that in our involvement with
life we are physically and psychologically coated by our experiences,"
Spence notes. (3) Her trash pigeons and mud animals suggest vulnerability,
for they are made of the most omnipresent, yet ephemeral materials. Underlying
themes of ecological responsibility, the problems of home-lessness, and
our culture's casual disregard, at times, for both, buoy her work. Dirt
and trash - however they are defined - may be washed away or picked up,
but they always regenerate, as do those experiences Spence suggests with
the layers of mud. Therefore Spence's mud animals and trash pigeons paradoxically
imply fragility and permanence.
Spence's pigeons suggest transformation, transgression, and redemption.
She notes, Our culture is incredibly disrespectful. I can feel the weight
of all this stuff. I want to help by reusing it. I want to participate
in the dialog of using materials originally used long ago. I try to find
where wholeness resides in the imperfect, where permanence exists in the
temporary. That's why I make things that look like they're about to fall
apart. (4) Spence encourages us to commute common to uncommon through
an act of faith. Through her pigeons, she asks us to believe in the redemption
of trash from social worthlessness to cultural value. Spence's use, then,
of the dirty newspapers and magazines that comprise the pigeons becomes
a reaffirmation of our humanity - she is a social and cultural recycler.
Because Spence makes the trash pigeons life-size and in various poses,
she endows them with an actual pigeon's quirkiness. She has bound each
one with bits of string, rubber bands, and wire, the effect of which is
to barely stabilize the tiny figures. The works' fragility may suggest
their association with homelessness. Spence's degraded ephemeral material
also suggests the vulnerability and ostracized humanity our homeless citizenry
embodies. The unstable distance between having a home and not is a reality
for many Americans. And any fragile security we have is often based on
elements out of our control such as corporate downsizing, opportunity,
and simple luck of the draw. Spence understands the tender spaces we travel
between good luck and bad, between trash and treasure, and suggests the
easily collapsible distance between them. By creating pigeons - often
seen, like the homeless, as dirty - from our detritus, Spence asserts
the cast-off as salvageable and even transcendent.
Spence produces her mud animals from stuffed animals, furry bathrobes,
and mud. By using such quotidian materials she creates works that contain
and articulate the disparate experiences that the stuffed animals and
furry bathrobes may represent. As French semiotician Roland Barthes has
noted, no object eludes meaning. Everything may be viewed as a sign of
something else. For instance, stuffed animals can signify childhood and
may remind us of a specific moment in our own childhood. In psychological
discourse, stuffed toys are transitory objects which help growing children
separate from their mothers. Stuffed toys, then, carry with them imprints
of childhood - of insecurity and security, of need and fulfillment. Bathrobes
carry their own messages. Because we often wear bathrobes over our naked
bodies, bathrobes sustain traces of bodily intimacy. Bathrobes may also
signify comfort, as a special robe may be worn to a tatter because of
the physical and psychological comfort it holds. As Spence notes, her
work "retains all the things that have touched it. That contact is
what I'm interested in." (5) It is perhaps this human gesture in
not only the stuffed animals and robes but also the hand-sculpted mud
that lends the mud animals their startling warmth and humanity. The effect
of the mud animals is one of both pathos and humanity. Spence notes they
"have a weighty quality, [they] feel the weight of being affected
by life, by time, by the heaviness of having a body. I want them to seem
weathered, like they're decomposing. I like them to feel like mud, like
dirt." (6)
If the human body is the measure for how we make sense of the world around
us, then our sense of scale may be skewed by these animals whose small
and gigantic sizes help sustain an unreality or hyperreality, like Alice's
experiences down the rabbit hole. Susan Stewart, in her discussion of
the miniature and the gigantic and their meanings, notes, Whereas we know
the miniature as a spatial whole or as temporal parts, we know the gigantic
only partially. We move through the landscape; it does not move through
us. Consequently, both the miniature and the gigantic may be described
through metaphors of containment-the miniature as contained, the gigantic
as container. (7) Spence's mud animals represent both, for they are either
miniature representations of real animals such as bears, or gigantic representations
of a child's tiny stuffed animal from which they are made. Their ambiguity
propels them into the spaces between the two. Stewart's metaphor of containment
is particularly apt. The mud animals are containers for the responses
we bring to these figures from the outside looking in. We may understand
our own bodies the same way: contained, sometimes metaphorically by outside
cultural and social forces; and container, of all our experiences.
Kathryn Spence's mud animals and pigeons embrace the notion that dirty
and clean are based on rituals we employ to order and make sense of the
world around us. Our desire to divide the world according to clean and
dirty becomes, as Douglas has noted, a creative force to understand our
experiences. Spence accepts the human desire to order, and understands
how we are shaped and layered by our experiences. Based on our myriad
emotional, intellectual, corporeal, and to whatever extent, spiritual
responses to our environment, our experiences become, like the mud Spence
uses, our bodies' invisible and sometimes visible sheathing. By creating
culturally recognized "value" from trash and dirt, Spence establishes
alliances between disparities, such as those in our ecology and economy,
and strives to reveal the linkages that must exist between our internal
and external experiences.
Dana Self
Curator
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