Muted Slicer Sessions

Jennifer Caroline Campbell appreciates Tenant of Culture’s cutting skills in a new show at Soft Opening

 

Haul (series), 2023, plastic, garments, thread, ribbon

At around the age of six I had my scissor-obsession phase. I snipped and sliced my way through a mega mix of soft items: my hair, my sister’s hair, my Sindy’s hair, magazines, newspapers, bedsheets, clothes, tablecloths and cushions all fell victim. I didn’t have the nerve to slice through an unopened letter or new packaged item though. I regret this hesitation now, as I examine the meticulously sliced and over-stitched works by Tenant of Culture, currently on display as part of her solo exhibition Ladder, at Soft Opening, London. In the series Haul she has seemingly attacked unopened packages of fast fashion mail-order garments. Geometric lines cut and stitch through the plastic packets, revealing snatches of their sabotaged contents. These almost crystalline geometric formations destroy and transform in the same moment, imposing a new order that is both structure and surface. They also disrupt the divide between what is outside and what is inner, allowing a flow of quenching contamination into the sanitary vacuum. 

Haul (series), 2023, plastic, garments, thread

Unlike my childhood impulses, carried out in disobedient secrecy, Tenant of Culture knows that these destructive gestures are a public performance, to be viewed via its traces. In particular, that they will be seen under the bright and magnifying light of the art gallery, which renders each micro-decision visible and loaded. What kind of action is being performed then, and what kind of statement is being made? What is released and what passes through these newly permeable membranes? 

 

A rich history of garment sabotage and damage mimicry is conversed with here, including the renaissance fashion for slit-covered clothing (symbolising political alliance and hierarchy), the mid eighteenth century cutters movement and silk weavers fight for stable wages. Asking how acts of sabotage and protest can find power and voice within the tightening grip of a profit-obsessed system certainly feels poignant in the current moment. Damage-as-decoration is a complex sign to unpick in this era of increasing wealth inequality. The recent vogue for pre-damaged garments feels particularly uncanny in the hands of Satisfy, a spenny athletic clothing brand whose signature t-shirt ‘Mothtech’ has a scattering of realistic looking moth holes, ‘strategically placed for ventilation’. These punctures are of course carefully designed not to ladder or further destroy the garment. In the Mothtech t-shirt, there are no hungry moths and the damage is not a wage protest or a signal that the wearer is either poor or punk. Yet I always think there is something to a trend, something that people in a certain moment are drawn to for a reason, something trying to speak. The works in Ladder give space for me to chew on this slippery web of signs, fashion, impulse and process.  

 

However, for me, the power of the works in the Haul series is in the tone of its language: like a muffled scream, these works contain a compelling mix of restraint and abandon, a meticulous rashness. The act of the transforming of these common objects pulls them away from enforced replicability and towards a unique and ineffable presence. There is something both adult and angsty in the tone of this treatment. Acts of performative sabotage take on a ritualistic flavour. Rhythmic mutating gestures hold on to the visceral, while keeping things dry and neat. It makes me think about a quiet kind of fury, one that knows it must sustain itself for the long run. An awareness, that the current absurdity of the world will not let-up any time soon, produces necessity for a slow burning outrage. So the rage takes careful paths across these mass-produced, click-of-a-key-board purchases, tightening and warping them like a piercing lattice of armour. A brow knitting and re-knitting causes the furrows to delve deep and stay put. 

Haul (series), 2023, plastic, garments, thread, ribbon

 

Some of the folds and cuts in Haul are garnished with ribbons or rivets, lending an aura of elegant certainty, so that these new forms convince me that they are the true forms. Proud and posing in their changed state, they quietly delight in the specificity that the world never meant them to have. 

 

Jennifer Caroline Campbell

 

Tenant of Culture, Ladder

Soft Opening,  6 Minerva Street, London EC2

8 September - 21 October 2023