INTERFACE

REVIEW

Becky Bowley: Im Material

Persistence Works, Sheffield
7-27 April

Reviewed by: Simon Bill »

There are lots of things you can do in the bath besides wash yourself. You can do little experiments, seeing how long you can hold your breath underwater, or how long it takes for your fingertips to go prune-like. You can look at your naked self, the front part anyway, from the chest down, and check your general condition. You can play at canoes and submarines. If you’re ecologically minded you can put the laundry in with you. You can lie there and think your thoughts. You can be inspired. If you’re an artist you can think about how bathtime figures in art history – revealed in David’s Death of Marat as a situation leaving a person vulnerable to attack; in Bonnard’s series of his wife bathing as a lovely experience, and worth doing often; and in Stuart Brisley’s work as a lonely and repulsive ordeal, particularly if you put offal in the tub as well. And if you are depressed you can slit your wrists.

Becky Bowley seems to have borne all these possibilities in mind for her twenty-minute video Bath (the keynote piece in a show which also includes another video, two companion sculptures, and a self-portrait mini-frieze). We see a bath filling, apparently with blood, but then we realise the water looks red because there is a rumpled red carpet in there. The carpet stirs and shifts, and then the sound of tearing fabric is added to that of the taps running. Bowley has been lying under the carpet all the time, to see how long she can bear it, and now she’s clawing her way out, or hatching. Her nymph-like body, very white against the red, manages to free itself from the sodden carpet: she gets out of the bath and turns the taps off.

Venue detail:
Yorkshire Artspace »
Persistence Works, 21 Brown Street, Sheffield S1 2BS

Post your comment

No one has commented on this article yet, why not be the first?

To post a comment you need to login

Back to top

Back to reviews »