Billboard Skirts – EMMA NEUBERG

Just What Is It That Makes Today’s Homes So Different, So Appealing? Material Actions at CCANW

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 I wanted the gravitas of that art-historical reference but I also wanted to draw a direct line between the burgeoning consumer culture Hamilton examined in the 1950s and its environmental consequences fifty years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…

Barbie Goes Shopping: Material Actions and the Plastics Age

Barbie Goes Shopping is my favourite of the Billboard Skirts. Made in 2007 from discarded polythene and second-hand denim, it belongs to a series exploring consumer desire, identity and the increasingly complicated relationship between the materials we throw away and the images that persuade us to acquire more.

In 2010, Barbie Goes Shopping and Hey Superman were selected by curator Hannah Rose for Material Actions at the Mirror Gallery in Plymouth. The exhibition brought together thirteen artists and makers whose work explored the capacity of materials and making to contribute to ethical, social, cultural and environmental change.

The timing gave the Billboard Skirts a different resonance. I had made them in autumn 2007, at the height of the consumer boom and a year before the financial collapse of 2008. By the time they reappeared in Material Actions, the culture of apparently limitless consumption against which they had been made looked rather different…

Billboard Skirts: Plastic, Painting and the Pacific Gyres

Billboard Skirts, 2007, was the first body of work in which I began to think beyond the picture plane. Developed from my PhD research in Constructed Textiles at the Royal College of Art, the series explored how discarded materials might become the substance of painting itself.

The series comprised six works: Disney War Games, Barbie Goes Shopping, Hey Superman, Swissland, I Thought It Would Come True and Just What Is It That Makes Today’s Homes So Appealing? Each was constructed from recycled plastic bags and second-hand denim, using a printing process that grew directly from my doctoral research into extending the life of waste plastics through design.

The works were first exhibited in Ever & Again: Experimental Recycled Textiles, curated by Professor Rebecca Earley at the Triangle Gallery…