Siobhan Liddell

Probably the first self-consciously feminist art movement was Pattern and Painting, which emerged in the early 70s. Its essentialist feminism led artists like Miriam Shapiro to elevate traditional women's tasks like sewing into high art. Art that looked very different emerged next: the cool, calculated displacements of Jenny Holzer, Barbara Kruger, Sherrie Levine and Cindy Sherman, who appropriated the master's tools to challenge his domination. A similar change occured in feminism. As the 70s faded into the 80s it shifted away from an essentialist optic to one that questioned the very existence of women's 'true essence', which culminated in Luce Irigary's description 'the sex that is not one'. In feminism now a reaction seems to be insinuating itself while, instead, art is diverging from trends in theory. Today artists like Collier Schorr, Kiki Smith, and Sue Williams engage in more direct, emotional and expressive art practices, while preserving the 'post-feminist' aversion to the heroism traditionally associated with expressionist art.

Against this background, it is easy to find disconcerting an environment peopled with Siobhan Liddell's lanky totems of timy scraps gathered from the waste of New York Chinatown's sweat shops - wood, cardboard, plastic. This is because cotton thread abounds throughout her work and it is impossible to see the fibre innocently. She uses thread to hold the concatenation of bits and pieces together; she winds it around a tube so that the thread covers its surface; in some instance a length of thread occupies the central part of the piece, and in one work it is the entire piece (wherein a thread dangles from the ceiling to curl on the floor). The difficulty is compounded by the non-comittal way in which she seems to employ it. What does it mean to use this symbol of domesticity at this point

The pale fibrous filament is, by its very nature, barely visible. In a proportionate relation to its inherent invisibility, it is over-laden with social meaning and excessive cultural baggage, the complexity and extension of which paradoxically makes the connective fibre doubly invisible - a position not unlike that of women despite, or precisely because of the type of use of women that prevails in media and advertising. Perhaps Liddell is right, at this point she doesn't have to do much with thread to let it reverberate with meaning.

The affinity of Liddell's slight combinations of poor materials with Richard Tuttle's tentative juxtapositions of simple elements is clear. But in Liddell's case the content threatens to inundate the modest structures. Let's pretend to stem the tide for a moment and get a larger cross-section of what's happening.

First and foremost, thread is metonymic to sewing, a pre-eminently female activity in the traditional hearth, though its more respectable public persona, the tailor, is masculine. In addition, we know that Liddell collects her material from clothing manufacturing refuse, which introduces the social dimension of production. Thus, without casting the net very far, we already find inscribed in ther interstices of Liddell's work references to two forms of oppression endemic to modernity: the way public and private are distinguished and industrial production. These themes echo the concerns of the Pattern and Painting movement, but without the nostalgia that made the earlier work corny and somewhat politically suspect, in my view.

Then, there is a telling linguistic play. Liddell's bare bones work makes up in alliterations what it misses in physical presence. Here are a few -

Her structures are threadbare: meagre, scanty and poor without poeticsm; they are truly threadbare.
The parts are threaded: strung together in succession, conjoined without being fused, their connection seems precarious but, like the threading on a screw, there is a flow from one to the next.

One threads ones way: weaving between pieces as if amongst obstacles. Only the danger is not to oneself, but to the ephemeral balance struck by the tenuous combinations.

The thread running through: that which runs the course of something, which connects its successive parts; in this case the thread is the thread.

One could go on forever, it seems. But her work keeps on bringing you back to itself. This return is not narcissistic, rather it is all-inclusive, which makes Liddell's slight interventions oddly generous.