disembodied;
Nude at the Window
at the point where proximity and distance lie
giving life to the stark white foam, encroaching
bearing its sweet aroma beyond
enticing you in through the open doorway.
passing through transience
engaging with timelessness.
1994
Super-8mm black and white film transferred to single channel video with no sound, 1’03”
part of a group show
Location:
The Tannery, Bermondsey, London
Super-8mm Camera: Sasha Koura
Sponsored by Paul Mitchell
The artist inhabited a ground floor room of a Bermondsey tannery and carefully washed her hair in silence for 4 hours crouched in the dark, decrepit space, where audience members gathered on the floor around her.
The shampoo traveled along the floorboards to the doorway leading outside.
You are confronted by a familiar action that is out of context; where time is compressed and all the life in between is elsewhere. A doorway from the bright sunshine outside leads you into this bare dust-filled room, which is otherwise quite dark. A past of activity reiterates, as it waits for new life in refurbishment.
A figure in the far corner transfixes the image of a painting, washing her hair over a single bowl of water. The weathered grit and mould of the room's disuse become buoyant with aromatic foam, spilling a presence into absence.
Bermondsey was once the centre of leather tanning in London with a history dating back to the fifteenth century, adjacent to copious water from the River Thames, oak trees for tannin from the Great North Wood to the south, and acres of space to keep animals. The building subsequently housed a cork factory after WW2. By the early 1990s with industry in decline and the need for housing, property developers drawn by the availability of cheap space and the cachet of loft-living, made Bermondsey Street an attractive place to live and work, gentrifying the area.
Paul Mitchell Shampoo-One: Chamomile extract, (deionised water/chamomile blend), sodium laureate sulphate (derived from coconut), cocamide dea, sodium chloride, cocamidopropyl betaine awapuhi extract, rosemary extract, jojoba oil, kelp extract, aloe vera gel, wheat germ oil, keratin amino acids, polyquaternium-28, henna extract, panthenol, hydroxypropyl, methylcellulose, methylparaben, terasodium edta, fragrance, critic acid, methylchloroisothiazlinone, methylisothiazolinone.