In 1997, Rei Kawakubo asked what a dress might do if it stopped following the body and started rearranging it. Her spring/summer collection for Comme des Garçons, Body Meets Dress, Dress Meets Body, sent models out in stretch gingham with down-filled pads sewn in at the hip, the shoulder and the back, making lumps where none were expected. The shapes divided opinion so sharply that Vogue and Elle both photographed the collection with the pads removed. Known ever since as the “lumps and bumps” collection, it rejected the polished silhouette of the 1980s and everything that silhouette said about femininity, desirability and keeping the body contained.
Titled Lumps and Bumps, the new group exhibition at Rose Easton in east London, picks up that same thread. It features five artists – Dogperson39, Sarah Benslimane, Sylvie Fleury, Charlotte Kingsnorth and Caitlin MacQueen – who work across sculpture, painting, assemblage and design. Though none of them make clothes, what they share with Kawakubo is a method; which is to treat bulge, distortion and excess as ways of making something new rather than something wrong. The exhibition’s accompanying text, written by Dal Chodha frames the stakes as a question of how the body is shown and understood when so much of it now lives as an image.
Sylvie Fleury, who was born in Geneva in 1961 and still lives there, shows a glowing blue chrome sculpture with no fixed outline. Spend time with it and its mounds seem to move, with it’s structure being compared by the gallery to the Venus de Milo left to rot on Neptune, her shoulders and breasts sinking into soft humps. Charlotte Kingsnorth, a London designer who trained at the Royal College of Art and has worked with Fendi and A$AP Rocky, takes the opposite tone. Her pale leather bench, which the press release likens to a marshmallow, sits beside carved logs and thick textiles that suggest a body that is “mostly, maybe, human but maybe not”.
Dogperson39, an artist based in Los Angeles who keeps their identity behind a digital alias, supplies the counterweight: an enormous flat rug, which the press release calls “a supple, direct portal to hell”. On the wall, Benslimane, who was born in Besançon in 1997 and works in Geneva, builds a grid of reflective, pillow-like panels from industrial metal. They catch the viewer in their own reflection while only promising comfort. MacQueen, who also lives in Los Angeles, paints a nightclub in thin layers of paint, with figures between dancing, watching and moving through each other, closer to a half-remembered night than to a photograph. There is a common thread in a tenderness or abundance within each work that stays just out of reach.
Top Image; Courtesy of Rose Easton, painting by Caitlin MacQueen. Lumps and Bumps runs until December 12 at Rose Easton, open Wednesday to Saturday, 12 to 6pm.
