Pip Culbert
‘nine pinnies’ / unmade by hand
There is a game I imagine a writer or grammarian playing in relation to Pip Culbert’s seam-works. It involves finding a literary equivalent for these fabric items in which everything but the stitching has been removed. If the works were prose, maybe they would be paragraphs from which the nouns, adjectives and verbs have been excised—leaving only the conjunctions, the stitching-together words.
Such a game might be placed alongside all the other games these works seem to be playing. For motorists or tourists, Culbert’s seams trace roadmaps or horticultural grids. Architects might find floorplans therein; engineers would detect the inner workings of flying machines or the load-bearing beams of bridges and villas. Children might recognise multiple entertainments chalked on a pavement; and art historians find echoes of Francis Picabia and Marcel Duchamp—then, a moment later, Piet Mondrian and Robert Ryman. Such are the many journeys upon which the works take us—the stitching like the white lines on a highway, with a narrow strip of road on either side.
The kind of reductionism practiced by Pip Culbert puts a lot of pressure on what little remains—but the resulting spareness is put to a good end, granting her mobility and ambiguity. The long-running seams trace the ducking and diving of her thought as it threads its way through feminism, fashion, art and history. The frailty of Culbert’s work—in a material sense—is also its strength. Its content is a very particular, finely articulated absence of content. Referencing not only dress patterns but patterns of thought and flight, Culbert’s Nine Pinnies (2004-06) are a poignant aside in the long-running conversation between utility and uselessness, work and play, art and a life attentively lived.
Gregory O’Brien
Pip Culbert artist bio:
Born Newcastle-on-Tyne, 1938
Lives and works in London, United Kingdom and Croagnes, France
Bachelor of Design (Industrial), Royal College of Art, London
Selected solo exhibitions include: '36 Pinnies, NZ', Dunedin Public Art Gallery (2005); 'Linen Line', SOFA Gallery, Christchurch (2004); 'Lisiere, Galerie Martagon, Malaucene, France (2003).
Selected group exhibitions include: 'Salope', Satelitte Galerie, Paris, France (2002); 'Unwearable Art: Clothing in New Media', Museum of Craft & Folk Art, San Francisco, USA (2002); 'More or Less', Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, Wellington (2001).
Image credits:
Pip Culbert
Details of 9 Pinnies 2004-06
cotton, nylon
Courtesy of 64zero3 Gallery, Christchurch and Gitte Weise Gallery, Berlin