CAZ HASWELL : MADE IN HONG KONG / CURTAINS
19 October - 11 November 2017 @ Flinders Street Gallery, Sydney, Australia
Caz Haswell is an artist deeply connected with the material and psychological charge of objects. In the past, she has created sculpture and textile work that is overtly erotic, but more abrasively than intimately so. This push-and-pull, attraction-repulsion dynamic is reflected in objects that seem familiar – either bodily or domestic – but are strangely proportioned or truncated, or made from unexpected materials. Door snakes hewn from leather and looped into sensuous, bodily forms; a stomach-shaped sculpture titled swollen hollow, made from hard terracotta; explicit messages conveyed in the genteel medium of tapestry. Haswell beckons us with one hand, but holds us at arm’s length with the other.
Where Haswell’s previous work shifts between frank sensuality and cool detachment, Made in Hong Kong / Curtains delves into more specific, personal territory, taking family history as its starting point. This work’s combination of personal, theatrical and material sensibilities is reflected in the exhibition title. Haswell was conceived in Hong Kong, a biographical detail that marks a time when her parents’ histories temporarily dovetailed. ‘Curtains’ is slang for end-of-the-line, or end-of-life, a nod to the passing of both Haswell’s parents in 2015. ‘Curtains’ also indicates the end of a performance, hinting at the theatrical nature of any artistic interpretation of history, whilst on a material level, it evokes the textiles that recur throughout Haswell’s practice.
Each work in Made in Hong Kong / Curtains is a response to an object that belonged to one of Haswell’s parents, collected and kept following their deaths. Haswell has woven together stories, memories and lived experiences with responses to the formal qualities of materials. In this exploration of personal and family mythology, objects become cues or even mnemonics for the retelling of stories. Like Louise Bourgeois, whose bodily soft sculptures and rigid metal ‘Cells’ draw out complex and at times fraught family histories, Haswell reconstructs fragmented stories in a material language of velvet, leather, clay, zinc plate, glass and polyurethane. She pays homage to existing family narratives, whilst also seeking out the dark corners and sharp edges that official retellings tend to skirt.
The selected objects - books, clothing, a photograph in an ornate gilt frame, a shotgun – are stacked, draped and stashed around Haswell’s studio between her own tools, materials, art books and past works. No longer the sacred and untouchable relics of the departed, they are more like talismans to be carried in the pocket and turned over in the hand. All except for her mother’s glasses – these remain wrapped up, out of view. Something about them – their proximity to her mother’s face, her body – prevents any sort of detachment from their original use. They are the lenses through which Haswell’s mother viewed the world, imprinted with her DNA through years of collected dust and cells. In response to her mother’s glasses, Haswell has forged new frames from single rods of clear glass, like three-dimensional sketches.
An essential element of Haswell’s practice is a protracted period of looking and thinking prior to action. When the work does start, it is often slow and tactile labour: tapestry, timber construction, mould making and hand building with clay or wax. She has approached her parents’ belongings with a combination of reverence, curiosity and playfulness, and the slow burn of her process is a fitting way to pay homage to objects of the past. Some works, like a hand-sewn and embroidered red velvet dressing gown and a white polyurethane shotgun, are direct reproductions of the original objects.
Others are another step removed, where Haswell has taken objects – her father’s collection of Theosophical texts; drawings by her mother – and responded to them more obliquely. Her father’s books have inspired a selection of gold-embossed leather book covers, while two small portraits drawn by her mother, who was not otherwise outwardly artistic, are partially transcribed onto hand- built plates.
Each of Haswell’s processes produces imperfect objects, either through the evidence of her hand or the irregularity of the material. Even tapestry, the most orderly of her processes, sees image and text pixelated to a visible grid. Just as each re- interpretation differs from the original object, so do stories morph and evolve each time they are re-told. From one generation to the next, the meaning of a particular anecdote might skew through a change of wording or emphasis. There is no way of knowing the ‘original’ story when it comes to family lore; all we have is an impression passed through layers of subjective filtering.
Through the leather book covers, Haswell transforms prosaic paperbacks into precious skins. Selected from her father’s library of much-thumbed texts on Theosophy – a belief system that incorporates esotericism, mysticism, religion and philosophy – the titles offer much to the imagination: A Treatise on Cosmic Fire; Esoteric Astrology; From Intellect to Intuition. Denuded of content, we are left to imagine the texts within, much like a child viewing spines on bookshelves or covers on bedside tables. By recreating the covers in leather, Haswell reimagines the books in her own material language, rendering them as fetish objects. When followed, a belief system like the one outlined by Theosophy becomes a kind of fetish: it is the subject of devotion, its paraphernalia laden with spiritual significance.
Many other kinds of stories can be told through the objects. They reflect an archaic division of the genders: the male as cerebral, and the female as bodily and domestic. It is possible Haswell selected objects from these categories through unconscious bias, or perhaps it is a reflection of her parents’ generation. The objects most associated with her mother were bodily and domestic, whilst her father was focused on more esoteric pursuits. From her mother’s side of the family Haswell also gleaned her grandfather’s shotgun and an ornately framed photograph. Her grandfather, who was a typesetter, carved the timber butt of the shotgun with an intricate scene of deer in a forest. Further along that line was a great- grandfather who made tapestries, a medium that Haswell uses in her own practice. If she were to trace her own artistic lineage, it would almost certainly run back through this maternal line.
As much as Made in Hong Kong / Curtains is about the story of a particular family, it is also about a connection to objects that is universal. The things we were surrounded with as children – in particular the precious relics, kept locked away from small hands – imprint themselves in our minds as fetishes or talismans. These objects are reminders of old stories, and they can also be repositories of all that goes unspoken: rebellions, schisms and secrets; hidden tattoos, failed relationships and former lovers. Haswell has drawn out known and unknown stories from her parents’ objects, and created her own versions that are alluring and strange. And if one looks for long enough, the objects start to speak.
- Rebecca Gallo, 2017