the pencil of nature

Exhibition Review by Dr Laura Salisbury Birkbeck College, University of London.

Louise Bourgeois stated that: "A garment is a wrapping that draws a person's imprint, it is a relic which serves as a replacement. It represents a person, a mood, a place, an authentic feeling." For her, clothes are the body's "second skin" that cling to its spirit, measuring and tracing its absence in a visual echo of forgotten corporeality. Susie Needham's photograms of family heirlooms - christening dresses, gloves and bonnets - reveal just such an awareness of the resonance of clothing by tracing and reimagining the ghostly images of the bodies of the long-dead and the forgotten. Both conceptually and technically, this work is a record of the passage of time and the patient processes of active remembering. This slow revelation of the garment's negative imprint and its barely perceptible traces of an unknown life (rather than an instant projection or the recovery of an explicit image, a recuperable face or a context), refuses to force these phantasmal bodies into categorisable presence and so disturbs the possibility of controlling the past through memory. Instead, the work represents an ethical process of remembering as the past reveals itself rather than submits to being recaptured. Indeed, importantly, the artist has relinquished control over the ultimate outcome of the work by allowing the image to form itself over and through time. These images recover the patience and emotional intensity of what has traditionally been seen as women's work: the laying out, the sewing (for these photograms are more sensitive than the eye, revealing the layers and structure, the processes of their construction), the remembering, the investment and fetishising of feeling in these heavily over-determined garments. These christening gowns that measure and record the size we once were, reinscribe in the present that first experience of the restriction of powerfully symbolic clothing; and in doing so, they bear within themselves the traces of the confirmation dress, the wedding dresses, the shroud, that have informed individual and collective female identities. The gown recovers the forgotten history of the body that wore it and those who invested it with significance. This work records how time does not simply obscure memory; instead, the traces of experience it lays down, the revelation of the bodily remains implicit within these garments, allows the object its own voice and reveals within such remembering, an active and implicitly ethical process.