Mona Hatoum, Rachel Whiteread and Latex Experiments

It was suggested that I look up artist Mona Hatoum, as she uses rubber to cast objects. The work that intrigued me the most is 'Marrow', 1996, a rubber cast of a baby's crib. In an interview with Janine Antoni, Hatoum says "I called the first work Marrow, as in bone marrow but without the bone structure to support it... it becomes the collapsed body. I used a honey-colored rubber which looks quite fleshy." It is interesting to observe how immediately powerful an object can be, how rich with connotations. The crib, in a similar way to Rachel Whiteread's mattresses, is unquestionably symbolic of the human body, which it has been made to hold. The crib is perhaps even more powerfully connected with the body than Whiteread's forms, as the legs and rails are the size of human bones and the frame is instantly skeletal. Hatoum also says "We usually expect furniture to be about giving support and comfort to the body. If these objects become either unstable or threatening, they become a reference to our fragility."

I love the duality of Hatoum's work. Not only is the crib symbolic of the collapsed body, but it is collapsed itself; it cannot support its own or an infant's weight. Its purpose has been removed. In this way, the work nods towards the female body, and the way it is made to support a baby; the collapse of a woman's body is also the collapse of her child (or potential child).

The use of rubber by Hatoum and Whiteread I find very interesting; it makes me wonder whether there is something intrinsic about its properties that appeal to or convey more feminine sensitivities. There are certainly connections with rubber and post-minimalism where, particularly female artists rejected the cold detachment of minimalist principles, retaining the aesthetic but with a new emotional awareness. Although post-minimalism began in the 1960s with the 1966 exhibition 'Eccentric Abstraction', curated by Lucy Lippard, it can definitely be felt in these later works of the 1990s. For the purpose of my own practice, with my use of latex, I must determine what it is about the material that makes it 'emotional'. The colour, reminiscent of bodily organs and fluids, is rich and dark and familiar. The shape and forms possible with rubber are curved, unlike the modernist materials of concrete and steel, they relate to the body. The texture and consistency is flexible like flesh, impressionable and warm. Emotion must come in understanding, recognising the material as something we know and feel. As I have found in my experiments, latex speaks instantly of skin without any intervention, the similarity is unshakeable. It would be a curious challenge to try to remove the emotion from latex, and make it cold.

 

 

 

There are very obvious visual links between some of my latex experimentation and these works because of the colour and aesthetic qualities of the material. I have also explored different ways of presenting the between-the-floorboards latex casts, propping them up against the wall in a way that resonates Whiteread's mattresses and their suggestion of limp bodies. Originally I put them against the wall, to extend the line of the floorboards up onto the vertical surface, distinguishing them a bit from the floorboards. I think this is one of the most successful ways of showing them as it connects the work to the environment in how it is reliant on the architecture.

 



Quotes taken from: http://bombmagazine.org/article/2130/