Sometimes when you strip life back to the bare bones it’s only you and this exact moment of decision making. And even then. How can you be sure they’re your decisions?
What is responding? Who is responding through you?
“After all, it is love that loves through us.”*
“And the things I thought I knew I wanted have gone off for a smoke around the back.”**
One of the things I enjoy about seeing good art. By which I mean art that affects me in some way. Is that there’s suddenly a conversation taking place in your head which has been sparked by someone else’s imagination.
Walking around the Serpentine Gallery’s Barbara Chase-Riboud exhibition not so long ago, this is how I felt. That with each new sculpture, I was listening in on a long conversation about things I’d never thought about, but which I was quickly beginning to understand.
The best thing about art is that these conversations are silent, with lots of voices all discussing ideas at once. But silent.
It creates a very restful richness inside the body, walking through a quiet room, manoeuvring our privately full minds around one another, hushed and polite while we fill up.
Chase-Riboud speaks of her work:
“I had used bronze in a fluid, liquid way, while the wool was static. So there was this paradoxical transfer of power from bronze to the silk or wool… So the wool became the strong element - let’s call it, for argument’s sake, the male element. And the bronze became the soft, or female element. I liked the impossibility, the contradiction of that.”
You can hear a conversation about gender going on throughout her work.
A conversation about materiality, about strength and softness. Strength in softness. Softness in strength.
There is also a conversation about relationship.
Relationships between different qualities. Between different colours. Between different ways of being. Being different alongside one another.
I like that both the wool and the bronze elements have their own personal struggles - knots and wrinkles that make them more beautifully intriguing.
I like the Cleopatra gold, the Darth Vader black, the Chinese emperor red. I like that whole continents are talking to one another in and out of time and space in this little gallery hidden in a park in a dull wintery corner of our urban world.
And I like that her exquisite drawings are a conversation between 3D form and 2D line:
And that she likes angels too:
Now that I have seen the work of Barbara Chase-Riboud I will be thinking of her as these conversations evolve in the fabrics and metals of my daily life.
And I’ll be wondering, too, about how silent things can have so much to say.
Barbara Chase-Ribaud’s exhibition, Infinite Folds, can be seen at the Serpentine North Gallery in Hyde Park, London until 10 April 2023.
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*The Rune card book by Ralph Blum | ** Woah! Life by Fyfe Dangerfield