Following its presentation at the Mirror Gallery in Plymouth in 2010, Material Actions travelled to the Centre for Contemporary Art and the Natural World (CCANW) at Haldon Forest Park, near Exeter, where it was shown from 27 November 2010 to 27 February 2011.

For this iteration, I exhibited one work from the Billboard Skirts series: Just What Is It that Makes Today’s Homes So Different, So Appealing?, 2007, a polythene print on cotton measuring 140 × 100 cm.

I deliberately borrowed the title in its entirety from Richard Hamilton’s celebrated 1956 collage, Just what is it that makes today’s homes so different, so appealing? I wanted the gravitas of that art-historical reference but I also wanted to draw a direct line between the burgeoning consumer culture Hamilton examined in the 1950s and its environmental consequences fifty years later.

Hamilton assembled the seductive signs of post-war consumer society inside the modern home. Half a century later, I was working with something that society had materially left behind: the discarded plastic carrier bag.

There was a feminist conversation with Hamilton’s image too. His domestic interior is conspicuously gendered, populated by idealised male and female bodies and the signs of domestic labour, leisure and consumption. By making my version as a skirt, I wanted to shift that conversation towards the female body itself: fashion, gender, advertising, consumption and the ways in which femininity is constructed through images and objects.

From Consumer Culture to the Natural World

Showing the work at the Centre for Contemporary Art and the Natural World placed it within a particularly appropriate—and different—context.

Material Actions formed part of CCANW’s wider 2010–11 programme, Fashion, Textiles and the Environment. Immediately preceding it was Fashion Footprints: Sustainable Approaches, an exhibition examining materials, production, garment use, end of life, consumption habits, locality, speed and our connection to the maker. Its accompanying programme included a workshop with designer and researcher Otto von Busch, now Professor of Integrated Design at Parsons School of Design in New York. Looking back, I am struck by the density of academic, artistic and environmental thinking around fashion and material culture that CCANW brought together during that season.

Material Actions had developed from ideas explored through Textile Forum South West’s Textile Footprint conference. Selected through a UK-wide open submission, the exhibition brought together thirteen makers whose work questioned how textile practice might contribute to ethical, social, cultural and environmental change.

At CCANW, therefore, the environmental implications of Just What Is It that Makes Today’s Homes So Different, So Appealing? came particularly strongly to the foreground.

The work had begun with the contradiction I found in plastic itself. It is seductive, colourful, cheap, extraordinarily adaptable and remarkably durable. Those qualities helped make it one of the defining materials of the twentieth-century Plastics Age, yet its very durability becomes deeply problematic once the object for which it was manufactured is discarded.

I use Plastics Age deliberately. When I was twenty, I saw The Plastics Age: From Modernity to Post-Modernity at the Victoria and Albert Museum in 1990. It made an enormous impression on me. Seventeen years later, when I made the Billboard Skirts, I was looking at what had happened to some of the materials and consumer habits that this extraordinary period of design had produced.

My response was not simply to represent that contradiction but to work with its physical remains.

The polythene retained fragments of the advertising and commercial imagery from its previous life. Cut, printed, montaged and reassembled, it became both subject and painterly material: evidence of consumption transformed into another image.

From Sail to Archaeological Display

There was another transformation at CCANW.

Clive Adams had three Billboard Skirts from which to choose: Barbie Goes Shopping, Hey Superman and Just What Is It that Makes Today’s Homes So Different, So Appealing? The comparatively small exhibition space meant that only one could be accommodated. He wrote to me:

“In your own case we will only be able to show one work and we are borrowing a low plinth from Plymouth. Possibly, we could show the one work that they didn’t display.”

The work ultimately selected was Just What Is It that Makes Today’s Homes So Different, So Appealing? I find that choice intriguing in retrospect. Of the three, it was the work that most explicitly announced an art-historical lineage through its direct quotation of Richard Hamilton.

The low plinth is equally interesting to me now.

At the Triangle Gallery in 2007, I had suspended the skirts from the mast of my improvised boat like sails and billboards. They were vertical, airborne and bodily. They occupied architectural space.

Hannah Rose’s presentation of the works at Plymouth introduced an entirely different physical language. The skirts were laid horizontally on specially made low plinths, and that display language travelled with the work to CCANW.

Looking at photographs of the CCANW exhibition now, those low horizontal structures remind me of archaeological display cases. The skirt no longer appears to be sailing through space or addressing us like a billboard. It becomes something closer to an artefact: an object laid out for examination, preserving evidence of another time.

Neither Hannah nor Clive described the display in those terms, so this is my interpretation looking back. But that is precisely what interests me about it.

Their curatorial point of view altered the work without altering the object itself.

Suspended, the skirt asserted itself as painting in space. Laid flat, it became almost archival—a material fragment of the Plastics Age carrying evidence of a particular moment in consumer culture.

Clive Adams and CCANW

Material Actions at CCANW was curated by its founder and director, Clive Adams. I remember our correspondence particularly warmly. His curatorial history stretched back through several decades of contemporary British art and his longstanding interest in relationships between art, landscape and the environment gave this iteration of the exhibition a particular resonance for me.

Our conversation continued beyond Material Actions. Clive later expressed interest in My Nature, a project I developed through my teaching and Textiles Hub London, first at Kingsgate Gallery in 2013 and later in another iteration at the Museum in the Park, Stroud, in 2018.

I value these continuities. An exhibition can be a temporary event but the encounters it creates between artists, curators and ideas can continue long afterwards.

The Material Actions project itself continued to travel. Clive subsequently organised further presentations at Create in Bristol and Bath Spa University. At Bath Spa I was invited to speak as part of the accompanying exhibition programme alongside Glenn Adamson.

Looking back across these different presentations, I can see the Billboard Skirts gradually acquiring histories I could not have anticipated when I made them in 2007.

What began with plastic carrier bags, discarded clothing and an improvised boat became, through successive exhibitions, part of conversations about consumerism, environmental responsibility, material agency, painting and the archive.

And perhaps the horizontal presentation of Just What Is It that Makes Today’s Homes So Different, So Appealing? was particularly appropriate for the work bearing Hamilton’s title.

Hamilton’s 1956 collage captured the seductive arrival of a consumer culture filled with new commodities, technologies, bodies and desires. My work repeated exactly the same question fifty years later but by then another question had become unavoidable:

What had happened to all those things that made modern homes so different, so appealing?

Where did they go when we no longer wanted them?

Here, laid out almost archaeologically, was part of the answer.

Plastic remained.

And so did the questions around it.

Exhibition

Material Actions
Centre for Contemporary Art and the Natural World (CCANW)
Haldon Forest Park, near Exeter
27 November 2010–27 February 2011

Curated by Clive Adams.

Developed in partnership with Plymouth College of Art and Textile Forum South West.

Just What Is It that Makes Today’s Homes So Different, So Appealing?, 2007
Polythene print on cotton
140 × 100 cm