As you walk around a Betty Woodman vase, perhaps what strikes you first is its face, or better, faces. Circle around each piece and the surface will undulate and veer – form, in Woodman鈥檚 work, never rests. Take a piece in her new show at the ICA,听Posing with Vases at the Beach (2008),听a painted diptych. From the 鈥榝ront鈥, a woman鈥檚 pale body reclines across the component parts. Bursts of blue and sunny yellow evoke the shoreline in the work鈥檚 title. Yet follow it round to its back and something utterly new awaits. That鈥檚 the benefit of three-dimensional works, quipped the American artist at a talk held at the gallery: you can get two paintings out of one piece.
In their shifting, colourful unruliness, Woodman鈥檚 works each become a perfect distillation of their creator, or more precisely, her multifaceted career. Like fractals, theirs is a prolific, expanding story writ small. If you鈥檙e not familiar with Woodman (and many in Britain aren’t: the ICA rights a wrong in being the first institution in the UK to offer a solo presentation of her work), this new show introduces you to just the last decade of the 85 year-old鈥檚 cheerful oeuvre. They follow what Woodman has characterised as a watershed moment in her working life, namely the major retrospective of her work at New York鈥檚 Metropolitan Museum in 2006. After that, she believes, she was free.聽If the Met show was a turning point, it didn鈥檛 lead to entirely new departures 鈥 and happily so. Many of the post-2006 works are an obvious continuation of decades of artistic practice: the grouping of vessels, for instance, like a pair of actors on a stage, and the near devotional interest in the rituals of the home. The show鈥檚 title,听Betty Woodman: Theatre of the Domestic,聽could apply quite comfortably to a retrospective spanning her wider career.
So what has changed? If clay is still her medium, her “magic” as she calls it, she鈥檚 looser with it, incorporating painting more defiantly than before. She admits having become 鈥渂esotted鈥 with Pierre Bonnard, and like all her influences, she nods to his legacy with frankness. Upstairs, the French painter鈥檚 presence grows, softly emanating from each of her benign, inviting coloured rooms. With their shared love of the domestic and apparent repudiation of the wider world, the kinship might seem obvious. Dig a little deeper, however, and a common fascination with context – how objects interact with each other and the places they occupy – begins to materialise. Bonnard鈥檚 interest in cutting up and dispersing his works, building in spaces to his paintings, starts to resemble the trained potter鈥檚 inevitable interest in the works鈥 negative spaces.
To think of Woodman as a straightforward potter or ceramicist would be deceptive 鈥 her works owe a great deal to her painter鈥檚 eye, and a concern for context makes her an ally of the installation artist too. While the years spent creating functional, usable vessels still surfaces in her latest works, perhaps what is most radically 鈥榥ew鈥 is her stepping back from this 鈥 a movement demonstrated most clearly in her rugs and wallpaper pieces. Wallpaper 9 (2015) lets go of function altogether. Here, the interstitial spaces between flitting coloured offcuts of clay will never contain. Like cooking, Woodman jokes, it鈥檚 when you use up your leftovers that you get truly creative.
If the era after the Met is Woodman at her least self-conscious, then Wallpaper 9 is perhaps the most euphoric expression of this new-found liberty. Made from boxes of scraps she never used or discarded, their attraction grew out of the fact each represented a form her hand would never cut and her mind would never conceive. In these hovering odds and ends outstretched across the walls, we perhaps see, in its truest form, Woodman鈥檚 art set free from her craft.
Imogen Greenhalgh
Betty Woodman: The Theatre of the Domestic, until 10 April, Institute of Contemporary Arts,听The Mall, London SW1Y 5AH.
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Credits
1. Installation view of聽Betty Woodman: The Theatre of the Domestic, 2016. Courtesy of the Institute of Contemporary Arts and Mark Blower.
