Bringing a new lease of life to found objects, Julie Cockburn鈥檚 delicate embellishment of photographs has attracted significant attention over the last few years. In September, it is the focus of a new exhibition at London鈥檚 Flowers Gallery. All Work and No Play explores two key tenets of the artist鈥檚 practice: graft and leisure. Her stitched pieces take hours of close attention and manual labour, which, she says, has encouraged her to 鈥減lay鈥 with materials and methods when she finishes her working day in the studio. She has experimented with novel ways of using quotidian things (sketching with plasticine being a particularly notable example), and during this 鈥渓eisure鈥 time also builds freeform, expressive sculptures such as Work Life Balance (2017), a set of tactile Perspex game parts.
By adding embroidery or splicing and reassembling the images she finds, Cockburn remakes things, offering them an afterlife 鈥 or resonance beyond their intended material form. In so doing she gives voice to these objects, rescuing them from obscurity in the process. This clearly engages with ideas of femininity: many of her images come from the 1940s and 1950s, and by acquiring a story, her subjects 鈥 often women 鈥 are, in an idiosyncratic way, written back into history. Her chosen medium of also subverts a stereotypically feminine and domestic pastime: these works are made to be seen and engaged with, taking needlework firmly from the private to the public sphere.
Likewise, the tension between labour and recreation provides a clear link between the period her found items come from and the present day. Midcentury Britain saw ongoing debates about the efficacy of a shortened working week, and the promotion of suitably moral (and reliably gendered) hobbies. The cultivation of such gentile pastimes as sewing was viewed as wholly appropriate for ladies 鈥 but Cockburn鈥檚 striking geometric patterns and vivid visual language certainly would not have been. In creating a disconnect between gentle sepia tones and sharp, bright colours, she fluently brings the past firmly into a present-day focus.
Anna Feintuck
Julie Cockburn: All Work and No Play聽opens 6 September at Flowers Gallery, London. For more information:聽
Credits:
1. Julie Cockburn, First Flush聽(2017). Courtesy of the artist and Flowers Gallery.
