Axminster carpet? The material of the avant garde? You’d better believe it. In Anna Perach’s hands tufted wool is transformed into bulbous, beastly sculptures and painterly screens. The rich colours, fuzzy surfaces and curvy forms of these works invite touch. I want to rub my hands across Perach’s works, nuzzle into them, embrace them – but they are also monstrous, often concealing claws or teeth.
The Ukraine-born, London-based artist has been a curatorial favourite over the last five years. Her distinctive work has become a mainstay of group shows, most recently Unruly Bodies at Goldsmith CCA and Threads at the Arnolfini. The bluntly titled Holes is her first public solo show. Holes, I guess, because the work of tufting is one of piercing and penetration, but also because the show is full of suggested portals and openings. Some, such as the circular apertures in a pictorial screen, might be links between one world and another. Others are rather more bodily – surgical, or obstetric.
In the past Perach’s sculptures have recalled the fantastical pagan “wild men” costumes worn at traditional festivals in mountainous regions of Europe. Many of her sculptures are wearable, albeit these bright tufted creations are very much destined for wild women rather than wild men. Perach’s particular interest is in female transgression and the ways in which women’s bodies and behaviour have historically been policed – through corseting and the pressure to conform to strict beauty standards; through the taboos relating to menses and women’s supposedly “leaky” bodies; and through the suppression of knowledge and power in the persecution of women for witchcraft in the 16th and 17th century.
Holes is a slightly different beast, closer to an installation or performance set. The gallery is accessed through custom doors – carved wooden frames set with panels embroidered with expressionistic faces, serene, screaming and obscene. Monstrous orange eyes gaze out from between psychedelic folk-art flourishes on the lower panels.
The centrepiece is a larger than lifesize sculpture based on the wax “anatomical Venus” figures crafted in the late 18th century. These were models of beautiful, naked women, positioned as though in peaceful repose, which could be opened to reveal their inner organs, in an icky melding of the erotic and the anatomical. The outer body of Perach’s Venus is Axminster. A panel on her abdomen unzips to reveal silk glass kidneys and a curled glass foetus all nestled into leather viscera. Hung on the wall beside her is a blood-red gauntlet, ready to be plunged into this exposed interior.
A pierced screen at one end of the gallery shows three standing female figures, stylised according to a broadly modernist flavour that nods to fauvism and Wassily Kandinsky’s early 20th century Blaue Reiter group. Studded with circular portholes, the work is strongly architectural as well as pictorial. It allows for voyeurism – you can walk round it to spy on the naked Venus, unseen.
The second gallery contains a kind of production line or processing unit: a large wooden straddle accessed by steps, beneath which lies an ominous-looking tub covered in bodily burgundy tufting – a womb lying within a wooden armature. At the head end is suspended an immense chandelier, with each Axminster arm ending in a curling blown glass spike.
At various times over the run of the exhibition the entire installation is animated by the performance work Ecstasies, which plays out against an entrancing, pulsating sound work by Laima Leyton. Entirely covered in skin-like bodysuits, from the tips of their toes to the crowns of their heads, four dancers move through ritualistic choreography that slowly progresses from uncanny jerky movements to the lustful abandon of a rave. At a pivotal moment, the Venus is slowly opened and a dancer in a deep red costume pulled from within, as though she were being simultaneously skinned and reborn.
Ecstasies is a performance of liberation – the ritualistic reawakening of the four female figures who populate this exhibition. The spectacle of a featureless, not-entirely-human entity being released from the cumbersome body of Venus made me think of the fantastical Macedonian horror movie You Won’t Be Alone in which a witch is reborn through the bodies of a sequence of women.
There is an important history of subversive fibre and textile art. In eastern Europe and countries of the former Soviet Union in the last century, weaving did not receive the same censorious scrutiny as painting. Weaving, knitting, embroidery and quilting, with their domestic associations, have also been appropriated by feminist artists such as Judy Chicago.
Perach works within an important tradition – albeit one that has only recently been afforded proper recognition within the artworld mainstream. Drawing deeply on European folk cultures as well as modern feminist texts, her tufted works are wild, pagan and liberatory.
