Call & Response
Part III: Blythe Taylor & Lise Tovesdatter Skou
Call & Response is an experimental project activating two window galleries as sites for collaborative exhibition-making. Click here to learn more.
Photo by Jacob Juhl
Call:
Preservation
By Blythe Taylor
March 12 - May 2, 2021
The Demo ROom at Galleri Image (Aarhus, Denmark)
In the video artwork Preservation, we see artist Blythe Taylor (UK) carefully arranging a collection of homemade foods on a black tabletop. One by one she sets down four glass canning jars filled with chilli sauce, sauerkraut, and tomato and pepper chutney. She completes the tableau with a canvas sack of dried garlic and a bowl of boiled broad beans, steaming hot.
With its simple gray background and dramatic side lighting, the video resembles 17th Century Dutch still life paintings, which often showcased luxury foods as a way of celebrating international trade. But Preservation presents the near opposite: the hyper-local and individualized economy of homegrown food.
Today these foods may spark debates about sustainable food production, global trade post-Brexit, and even food-hoarding amidst the pandemic. But with this work, Taylor also considers the role of surplus food production in the historical development of classed societies and, ultimately, in the oppression of women, whose subjugation can be traced back to advancements in agriculture.
Photo by Jacob Juhl
Response:
Solid Objects
By Lise Tovesdatter Skou
May 21 - July 25, 2021
The Demo Room at Galleri Image (Aarhus, Denmark)
Lise Tovesdatter Skou’s installation SOLID OBJECTS centers around a large jar filled with homemade kombucha, which is a fermented tea. Floating at the top of the jar is the symbiotic culture of bacteria and yeast (SCOBY) used to kickstart the fermentation process - a slimy beige blob, sometimes known as the kombucha’s microbial “mother.”
The artist brewed this kombucha three years ago as part of her artistic research project, Trade Test Site, which explores feminist critiques of the political economy. Her kombucha workshop was part of a larger effort to empower people to subvert capitalism by producing their own food at home - an effort targeted especially at women in precarious economic situations, such as artists and single mothers. The SCOBY has since grown wild, slowly overtaking the jar in the years following the workshop.
With SOLID OBJECTS Skou revisits this kombucha and frames it in a new light. She has painted The Demo Room’s walls, ceilings, and floor ultramarine - a specific shade of blue made from the semi-precious stone, lapis lazuli. Historically this blue was used by Renaissance painters to display wealth and status, due to the pigment’s extravagant cost. Here, as a backdrop for the kombucha jar, the blue shrouds the SCOBY in an aura of value. What is the value of homemade food, and the pursuit of sustainable economies, against the oppressive forces of capitalism?
Photo by Jacob Juhl
Photo by Jacob Juhl
Photo by Jacob Juhl
Photo by Jacob Juhl
The Great Mother
by Blythe Taylor & Lise Tovesdatter Skou
23 OCTOBER – 6 NOVEMBER, 2021
AirSpace Gallery (Stoke-on-Trent, UK)
Borrowing its title from Erich Neumann’s book of female archetypes, THE GREAT MOTHER is a duo exhibition by Blythe Taylor (UK) and Lise Tovesdatter Skou (DK) that considers women’s labour through an agricultural lens.
The archetypal “Great Mother” connotes ideas of fertility, care, and abundance - she is a womb that carries seed, a vessel of production, whose role is to provide, nurture and nourish. This vision of womanhood has been idealized across cultures and historical eras. Many famous examples of the Great Mother figure - such as Demeter, Greek goddess of harvest and agriculture - make obvious the connection between reproductive fertility and food production. But it is dangerous to conflate women’s bodies and nature’s bounty. The relations between female labour and agriculture are layered and complex, especially as a function of capitalism.
It is with this in mind that Taylor and Tovesdatter Skou developed The Great Mother exhibition for the window at AirSpace Gallery. Each half of the window contains a hanging installation of woven artworks, made with natural materials and encoded with pattern.
Blythe Taylor’s installation features a series of corn dolls, which are small, decorative objects made by braiding wheat straws together into three-dimensional patterns. Historically used as a kind of talisman, corn dolls were believed to house the spirit of the crop over winter, and were used in various harvest rituals across the UK (many of which were explicitly gendered). Taylor’s corn dolls assume traditional shapes such as the Country Man’s Favour and the Spiral/Drop Dolly. The dolls are suspended from the gallery’s ceiling to form a spatial pattern reminiscent of those printed on domestic textiles.
For her work entitled They have no song, the sedges dry, and still they sing, Lise Tovesdatter Skou has woven a long, narrow tablecloth using flax that was grown and spun by a group of elderly women in rural Denmark. Unfolding along the length of the tablecloth is an image of sound waves, taken from audio recordings of the artist in conversation with women about hidden labour, care work, and precarity. Tovesdatter Skou wove this sonic pattern with medicinal plants from her own garden, such as the herbal antidepressant hypericum perforatum. Such materials underscore the artist’s feminized work (gardening, weaving) with caregiving in the domestic sphere.
Photo by Glen Stoker
Artwork by Lise Tovesdatter Skou, photo by Glen Stoker
Art and photo by Blythe Taylor