Heat in Parisian summertime. Afternoon sun, a soft halo surrounding pedestrian movements. Shiny limbs. The body as a repository – for warmth and intimacy; for saliva and oozing. For working and washing, cleansing and consoling.
Arriving to Pauline Perplexe, I’m thinking about an email chain with Darya and Esther before the visit, discussing the social orchestration with which objects impact us, a humanising of the materials in our day-to-day. In turn, our bodies being part of the fabric of things. A meshing, an attempt to entwine, to mould into – with degrees of success and failing, a stickiness carried off with ardour or arduousness.
Entering, a cluster of waste baskets, or trashcans – I wonder, if not baskets, upturned condoms? – on the floor of the front room. Spread, waxy; skin-like vessels, harbouring creamy-green pools. They are aptly titled Dirty Work. Darya shares how the waste basket cues the invisible labour of maids, objects commonly found in hotels where she has worked – Darya is a sex-worker, her clients bringing her into such spaces. She posits the basket – perhaps by extension, the hotel – as a site of labour, of domesticity and sexual labour. Such baskets are metaphorical of dirty work, of roles in which the body is put to work. Identity as servitude. I learn these forms are the casts of waste baskets Darya took from spaces where she would meet clients. My mind circles between images of her bent down before the knowing gaze of a client, to the suggestion of the baskets’ form as a collection point, a place to deposit dirt/fluids/sinfulness. I dwell on my equation of sinful and sexual, feelings of play versus a struggle with feelings of lust. The figure as object as vessel, the notion of sexual performance as a power play, as work, as giving way to/into something. To reveal, to attempt truth-finding.
I ponder this before moving closer to the milky volumes, discovering upon inspection the inner curve of some baskets imprinted with a small blue linocut of a woman giving head. I wonder if she’s enjoying this act at first, then ponder whether this is Darya, if this is every sex worker, if they feel like a moment in time, their bodies objects for a moment, holding something of another. This printing process feels fitting, grounded in the concept of repeating images, repetitive printing actions akin to the repetitive synthesis of emotional attention with her clients, repeated synthesising of an authentic experience. Though erotic in source material, the forms are saturated less with sexuality and more imbued with labour, with domesticity.
I would have liked to have seen more baskets truthfully, a growing mass of these forms, a recollection of the numerous clients. A sense of how many cleaners/housekeepers/carers she has engaged with, in person or via the objects in the room. The many rooms, the many sites of confession, the work never slowing, the intimacy reignited with every booking. However, the concentrated gathering did enable me to focus my attention deeply, noting how in stripping meaning back to the unassuming form of a basket, subtle in its charged imagery, Darya effectively presents the silenced or largely invisible sector of sex work via material. The act of reproduction itself becoming the medium – reworking the basket moulds over and over. She prompts the question, what does authentic representation look like in a labour sector without trace? Treating the exterior with her print, the artwork becomes an archive, the archiving of a livelihood, a livelihood as surface, as (surface) tension, as a taut, wrapped site. A site for spilling on/over/through. For fluids/contact/inspection, two women in a room sharing parts of themselves. I wonder if Darya found it hard to put herself into the work; to leave such intimacy for a newcomer to walk into. Herein lies an exploration of authorship and the visibility of labour, through stratifying surfaces charged with tactile invocation.
Beyond the window of Pauline Perplexe’s gallery lie plasticky basket-forms also. Cream and blue, fittingly. Such objects become an extension of the exhibition experience, the naked eye – the gallery’s transparent window – as a portal into the experience economy. Varying perceptions in play; I think of the many people passing through, in and around the gallery, what they use their baskets or waste bins for, what their bodies are for, how they are received. If they are useful or cared for, if they are solitary in their practices, if they carry burdens. If they are discarded or seen. I consider seen; how this is the first plausibly pornographic content I have encountered for a while, how bodies are watched/messages are ‘seen’/how porn content often posits dramatic intercourse in mundane, ordinary spaces. Offices as boudoirs; plain walled galleries as sites of undressing. How the baskets – and thus, the sex worker/server/body – defined by their appearance/content/function, are heterotopias, in between objects/spaces/beings constantly redefined, performing.
Admittedly, I was thrown by the pairing of Esther and Darya’s practices, their content and material on paper, and in person, contrasting. I had experienced Esther’s vibrant colours and sculptural use of textiles previously, and regarded her works as celebrations of festivities, of Spanish interiors, of childhood playfulness. Abstractions of meandering imaginations. Certainly not reflections of sexual and domestic labour in latex. Esther’s practice here continued my impression, Darya’s works in the first room paired with hand-dyed fabric panels is somewhat jarring. Esther’s textiles echo a physical encounter with material, the artist constantly moving around the linen stretches in her studio, through dying and fading the fabrics, stretching out canvas swathes as tall as her. The works are softer, less open to provocation than Darya’s, I had initially thought. However, this too is a vision of labour, of repeatedly working the material. Though gentler in its appearance, Gatón’s work also speaks to an affective relationship with objects, the ways in which our eye is unconsciously charged with each environment and forms encountered.
La que camina, the first smaller panel of Esther’s, is a wash of blues and greens, flecked with warm yellow. As I once described Esther’s work, a phosphoresce of local lore. A pool/a portal/an oil spill conjured, enticing you to come closer. I learn the textile’s colour also comes from bleaching parts of the fabric after dying, a level of aggressing towards the material, a re-working, re-navigating. Testing and crossing boundaries, opening up the material’s potential. Such swirls feel freeing, moving beyond adult torments, but still an element of pulling and pushing against things, antagonistic. I experience what feels close to a childlike, hallucinated gaze, intrigued by the texture and emanating warmth, but also a desire to question, to reconsider, to step beyond familiarity.
On the far wall, Kindness glides about my house hangs suspended, this one much larger in scale. Once again a swirl of hues, but this time quieter – pale pinks and rusted reds, subtle marks of cream and white. A bodily – perhaps, spiritual – presence, hovering, a sense of anticipation. Its length mirrors the doorway opposite and adjacent window – more portals. I’m below it, at its foot, looking up. Its rose tones speak of comfort and enveloping, not so much concrete physicality but feelings and action, yet at the same time visceral connotations, something more human than the smaller panel. The cream paint streaks seem to bloom – a small erupting – and the subtly woven metallic flakes sparkle. I oscillate from spangled girlhood adornments on denim jackets – recalling Esther’s curiosity for DIY practices – to the glisten of sweat, of beaded drops. Of a body moving, working, loving, tiring. I discuss the difference between the English ‘wary’ and ‘weary’ with a Parisian on the commute after, note a similarity I hadn’t before – of fatigued bodies seeking to create something new, of lovers languid post-coitus, perhaps tired from many years of holding the other to then fall apart. Breakups, dissatisfaction, strained pleasure. Aching limbs and wandering minds.
Continuing into the smaller side room – only apparent by its small staircase ascending up to it, again the viewer on a level below the works – I find a diptych, Igual que guantes grises. These varnish works of gold flecks on stained birch wood, feel like burnt gilded remains of a church, abandoned icons burnished but still hinting at a power, a pull. Esther shares with me how they feel like memories of the environments in which she grew up, ‘the Castilian baroque temples and time spent among stories of saints, symbolically shaped pastries, deep-rooted Catholicism.’ Such ornamental and fractured images have begun to impress upon me too, stationed before them as though in prayer. Adoration despite their brokenness. I think of Darya’s practice again, of sex workers needing to perform as part of manufactured emotional transits, of a system of giving and receiving. Prayer station to the altar to bedside kneeling. There are seemingly more reverberations between these practices, acts of pleasure and pleasing, revering taking place in our home settings. The show’s title, tetillas – appropriated from a slang word for both small breasts and a rural Spanish cheese – falls into place, a succinct pointer to this duo’s reflection on (feminine) eroticism and domesticity, on precarious and elevated rituals.
I continue to hold regard for this shift to the sacred versus taboo, espying Darya’s second work slumped against the wall, as though dispelled, but perhaps, in fact, holding regard for the disregarded. It has been selected for this show after all. The work – indecipherable at first – seems to almost fall down and away from Esther’s birch panels, as though finally giving way. The polyurethane resin form is an upside-down mask of a goat. I begin thinking of the pagan god Pan and his devilish symbolism, often seen with the Greek god Dionysus, of madness and ecstasy. The work’s title cleverly explains itself – Yom Kipporno, unveiling Darya’s humour and acute self-awareness; a playful portmanteau of the Jewish holiday Yom Kippur – a time to expiate sins and achieve reconciliation – and porno, alluding to her work. The piece is the cast of a ram’s head mask that Darya once wore for a client. She expresses how it could be the embodiment of a scapegoat – ‘to be a sex worker is to be a scapegoat in the contemporary political economy of the body… for those who feel threatened by the power of autonomous sexual care and deeply undivided attention disqualified by the state.’
Religious symbology comes to the fore and unexpectedly unites the two practices. This smaller space presents itself like a church de-robing room, where the icons and mask – the vestments and ceremony – have been left alone, the backroom where things are removed from plain sight, but where you are most up against the subject matter, the most honest engagement. Without questioning, all the works throughout this exhibition have silently willed me to lower myself or look up to them, almost to kneel – a religious act, an action of service. Kneeling through cleaning, through sex. Kneeling as giving in, dropping down, getting closer to something. I’m going down on the work here. Raw and ruinous. Darya had previously shared how for her, the appropriation of religious iconography is about judgement, or what Judith Butler would call ‘the psychic life of power.’ A nexus of morality and ethics unfolds – be that a subtle admission of guilt, a self-effacing comment about having a sexual appetite, or justification for why we seek intimacy in the first place.
I wonder if this is the visualisation of tenderness, accepting the mess/mass of a body and its work, of self-reconciliation with our discomforts felt via bodily comfort. I shift, and in repositioning the baskets return to view, reminding me of my body as a shedding/masticating/giving and receiving entity. Aroused and disgusted. Something soothing then comes to mind – Esther’s textiles healing and holding their colours, blushed skin after prolonged interaction working the surfaces, stretching and shaping in the studio; after reassembling the self; after long evening encounters. Intimacy sticking in the waste baskets. I wonder how many objects hold skin cells, spit, tears and saliva; how many surfaces cradle my remains. How many newcomers enter a room I’ve left, and sense me as their own secretions hit the fabric, meeting mine.
Next door beyond the gallery, a soft voice sings in a studio – I hear their surroundings creak, weight on wood and the occasional hit of a tool – and I am drawn to this closeness with a stranger, drawn back to my closeness to these artists and their work. How this space holds a circuit of entering/revolving/leaving again. How the gallery opens up – it has no fussy entrance, the door opens with a bienvenue mat – ushering with welcomeness. In exiting, I see the outdoor bins again. They now feel like relics from a sacred, albeit entirely unholy exchange, of exchange and utility. I’m reminded of my Catholic schooling and first intimacies, of shame and penitence, of work and working people out, of breaking down and breakthroughs. From child to adult self. I am still reckoning with such matters. This show – boldly and tenderly – reckons with such things too. I feel cared by, and holding care for, the works in the room.
