Fashioning Landscape Series: Pleating V 2007

Performed at Intervention, Fieldgate Gallery, London, September 2007.

Paper, ribbon, glue.

Live performance: 2 hours, 30 minutes.

The apron is an enormous stiff white monster. It not only covers the front of the body, but extends beyond the breast, belly, toes and across the floor, clashing with the wall where it has no other place to go, but upwards. And like a wave, it starts to arch, coming back on itself, coming back for her?

The apron is white, ice blue crisp, but it is not clean. It has been sullied, collecting residues of the work, the action she has been doing, is continually doing, relentlessly doing. But what is the work, the action?

The work is not external to itself, it is not cleaning, dusting, ironing, scrubbing, washing, it is itself, it is creating/making itself - it is circular.  This apron is not protection, armour from the dirt and dust, the residues of actions and work, but is the work itself, object and action at the same time.

Pleating reinforces her sex. She makes/re-makes her body, her lips, her labia, her womb. As she pleats, she rubs, rubbing with her fingertips, the palm of her hand, her forearm, the rubbing is friction and heat, and the heat penetrates.

When she is pleating she is drawing. She is creation; she is expanding and contracting body, space and time; external to internal; public to private. She creates caves, caverns, crannies - secrets in the folds… ‘To fold is to withdraw into the recesses of the world.’

Narrative unfolds in space and time, ‘viewing is re-enactment - an act of unfolding the fold’, (de-pleating the pleat.)  Within the act of rubbing, of forming the folds, the folding unfolds and reveals. The pleats, worn, rubbed(out), become de-pleated, depleted, exhausted.

It is a futile act…at the same time, creation and destruction.