Selected Texts
[The following text accompanies works from Hudspith’s Illness and Objecthood series including her sculpture Body Double, photograph Bound up in White Fishnet, and photographic diptych Of my presence as if catching a stranger’s wave, all from 2019.]
Women, Art & Illness
by Laura Hudspith
My days consist of learning how to be a person with an autoimmune disorder that strikes in tandem with a set of neurological non-happenings.
A strata of symptoms across the terrain of my body;
strange sensations that electrify my legs and course through my muscles;
an over-sensitization of my skin;
a pulsing in my pelvis that occasionally announces itself as a blade to my lips.
A looming question that can only be made dull by the mundanity of bad television:
Is that flesh mine or its own? Red herrings. What does it mean to have agency when there are two forces at work trying to exert control within one unit, one packaged mind-body?
There are days when I feel I am a woman
trapped inside a body that betrays her.
A traitor. A traitor’s body. The treachery of me.
And how can I separate the two persons so that I, one, can live fully?
A correlation can be drawn along ironic lines now blurred, between this feminist-mind-body of mine and the origins of Feminism itself—a struggle for equilibrium. Ironic as my interest in what now seems to be circular questions surrounding object-oriented ontology, semiotics; heeding the fetishization of objects & the fetishized body—bondage—moulding and casting my own limbs: hands, arms, legs, feet. These now sit in my studio as stony objects whose exquisite detail playfully elicits a dual sense of the wonders of biology as well as their own unique ‘thingness’, each bound up in white fishnet stockings. Abstracted from the person l, the fetishized body elicits not to me or of mine.
They lay simultaneously victorious and unyielding
taking pleasure in their exposure,
and yet they are anti-feminist.
Does the body remember its cast, its entombment—bound in a mould, a cage that forms the material that would otherwise disembody (her)itself. Odd, that I was drawn to the antidotal spiny form of giant aloe leaves in the weeks leading to the announcement of her presence, the other within me, my new studiomate. Cast in effervescent pink plastic, aloe too is in stasis, a long, thick double-edged serrated sword of like-form to the leg beside it.
With an autoimmune disorder the antidote is often received as the toxin—an unexpected reaction.
I wonder if separating mind from body as ‘other self’ or ‘other thing’ might help me make sense; might allow the feminist to break her confines. Never before has body elicited thingness so strongly to me. The relationship is more tenuous, not a tender love between mind and body, a unification that provides the physical and metaphysical foundation for conviction and agency. Rather, more like an instrument that plays itself, each chord plucked one of a dis-symphony of pain and disassociation; a body out of tune with herself.
The aloe is the sword and the body the red herring.
I, the entrapped, as the artist, as the agent.
To perceive and use then my body as object-subject and agent, body as material is transformative.
Perhaps I, we, will find equilibrium here.
[The following text written by Morris Fox is the exhibition essay for Lorem Ipsum, an installation combining sculpture, video and interactivity created for This Month Only Gallery, Toronto, June 2018. Morris Fox is an artist, curator and writer based in Toronto, Canada.]
LOREM IPSUM; An exhibition by Laura Hudspith
by Morris Fox
"Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum."
Towards Dolorem Ipsum
Laura Hudspith’s work does not register as a dichotomy between the artificial, the synthetic, the “real/unreal”. It works instead upon a form of reconfiguration, a once more shaping a togetherness out of the tropes and emptied symbols, the nothing signifiers that spill out of the mouth of the horn (cornucopia), simultaneously absence and abundance. Her work provokes a hybrid viewership, forming conduits to both the virtual and virtuoso–the free-fall of synthetic images that gloss our feed and the conspicuously limitless and looping ouroboros of a starved contemporary art, a culture eating itself. This work is presage, an omen of the transactional lives we are interred in. Her work makes visible the flaw in the infinity mirror, between what is seemingly real and the systems of simulations imposed on us, the infernal trinity of the art object, tastemaker and gallerist.
Her work critiques the current trajectory that renders art as ‘artless’, without definition, or specificity of meaning. She reconfigures the body fragments of the “art world,” figures a once-more, against the current, which is also a concurrence. The material and virtual form of the glyphs appear and are circulated and dispersed in digital fora, emptied of their diegesis. Fighting with/against this particular crisis of material culture, the work is a disturbance to the seemingly endless manoeuvering of matter that simulates and entangles human and artistic labour–the transactables of our desires.
The cornucopia is a symbol of lavish abundance, an unending nourishment. However, one must not forget that the cornucopia is also associated with underworld deities. The feast offered is from and for the dead, an infernal party, or picnic. Fortune favours the damned. The cornucopia is a myth-object–a woman’s body–the broken off horn of the goddess Amaltheia whose body provided abundance and strength to the infantile sky father deity. Hudspith’s work recalls this object of abundance, but it is dried up, providing only a plastic sustenance. While she offers a feast of digital materialism, the objects are also tangible. She calls to mind this ‘lemon’–that the virtual is real, and the real synthetic, reminding us of the co-opted object of our desire, over-pouring and spilling a body of work that critiques something already missing in our visual culture: substance.
[The following text TL;DR an exhibition by Laura Hudspith, was written by Ashley McLellan as the exhibition essay for TL;DR, first produced for Project Gallery, Toronto, 2017.]
TL;DR an exhibition by Laura Hudspith
by Ashley McLellan
Imagine a perfectly ripe banana. It has a specific texture and scent and when transported in a bag, tender carob coloured patches form on the yellow skin as a result of the pressure. Now imagine a plastic banana. Its colour and form are homogenous. No soft brown spots appear on the surface to indicate that it is overripe and it does not emit a pungent odour as it decomposes. The plastic banana exists indefinitely at one stage and creates a singular sense experience. It is a symbol of the natural banana meant for visual consumption. So why produce a forgery? The real thing can be both enticing and revolting as it moves from stage to stage. But the plastic version or fake is merely an object that takes up space and provides nothing. Considering the current state of affairs, it is an environmental burden that has nowhere to go, instead remaining whole and haunting the life cycle of natural beings that decay and disappear. The plastic is separate from the living environment, it does not change in relation to natural fluctuations but remains closed off and undisturbed. Out of this awareness arises a moment where the present must contend with all the undead plastic of the past; and possibly imagine a future swamped with an ongoing accumulation of plastic goods.
In Laura Hudspith’s exhibition TL;DR, plastic fruits and silicone desserts are strewn about a tableau vivant and a dense cluster of faux flowers cover a shallow grave that pulsates with light from below. Fakes dominate the space. The material accumulation reveals a desire to be seen in a certain way; discretely and without inviting further inspection. At the same time, there is an intense eagerness to be seen and acknowledged. Inevitably drawing attention to what is contrived.
On the floor is a garden grave filled with a variety of flowers in shades of pink, purple and yellow. The flowers are vibrant and alluring; each one is perfectly coloured. There is a slight sheen on the surface, denoting the plasticity of the blooms. It is an unnatural garden with a pulsating blue light that illuminates it from below. The natural beauty of real, ephemeral flowers has been reproduced and preserved by the imitation blooms. A globular substance has been splattered across the luscious display and has dripped down and settled on the petals. The thick, white substance seems as though it would clog the porous boundaries of real flowers. The splattering of the gooey substance seems to be a violation of the garden’s bright blooms. But then again, I find myself asking if plastic objects can be infringed upon in this way?
In the video projection, a young woman lays on her back on the marbled surface of a large wooden dining room table; her soft subtle breathing is the only sign of life. She wears a clear, plastic dress that is tightly bound around the chest exposing her breasts while also binding and flattening them, potentially muting the desires placed on her female-gendered body. All around her are displays of fake fruit and sweets. There are tea cups and crystal glasses filled with frost and blush coloured liquids, platters of apples and peaches, jelly-like desserts set out on the surface of the table as well as grapes and rotting strawberries strewn about. Dishes are stacked haphazardly. All the food seems good enough to eat. But what is edible is rotting and what is ‘fresh’ is plastic. I am both drawn in and repulsed by the beauty of the excessive display. The plastic objects are visually appealing and the perceived texture is intriguing; in stark contrast is the notion of decomposing fruit. Do I want beauty at the expense of what is natural?
Like all organic objects, the woman on the table is also subject to the process of aging. Her life force veers towards death while all around her recalcitrant objects defy dissolution. In this light, she too is a fruit ripe for picking; but this window of time will close abruptly as she ages. I have a vision of her lying on the table as guests sit all around taking pleasure in the display. For whatever reason, the guests quickly abandon the decadent scene and leave the woman behind laying near motionless in the middle. Maybe her living, breathing vulnerability all of a sudden flashed into perspective. Maybe there is something newer and shinier to absorb. In the gallery space the neon sign TL;DR or ‘too long; didn’t read’ advertises this short attention span. If a passage of writing is too long or too verbose, a reader has grounds to dismiss it and move on. TL;DR allows a reader to assume that an argument or passage is leading nowhere or that an argument could be condensed in order to arrive at a point faster. When bombarded by an endless amounts of reading, I can choose to feign engagement with an idea by glancing over an article and passing it on. ‘TL;DR’ but got what I wanted out of it anyway.
Amidst all the natural and unnatural, real and fake, I feel I am presented with a choice of how to try and be in the world in relation to people and objects. There is the path of feigning awareness and connectivity, and of being in relation with one and other only so far as is mediated by technology and is beneficial to my own sense of awareness. To post and re-post. On the other hand I can let go of false fronts and false intimacies and be exposed and open. For me, this is a choice of being troublesome and messy and of being vulnerable to the unpredictable, amorphous energies that vibrate and pass through my body. To be aware of how I effect and am affected. To let the soft spots slowly take over and encompass my being.