Sluice

Sluice
1997

Media: mixed media 

Size: 250 x 120 x 170mm

Exhibited:

2013 – Unruly Objects (one-person exhibition), Cornerstone Gallery and Arts Centre, Didcot, Oxfordshire.

2008 – Locations (one-person exhibition), OVADA, Oxford.

1999 – Taking Stock (one-person exhibition), Keele University Art Gallery.

1997 – “…from the institution." (one-person exhibition), Stoke-on-Trent City Museum and Art Gallery.

About this work:

A sluice is a space of utility, often a room where the abject is processed in various forms. Where the soilings and disposables of hospital wards and other social institutions are ordered and concentrated in both used and un-used states, either to be dealt with there and then, or sent on into other parts of the institution for cleansing, examination or incineration. A sluice is a space of strangeness where unfamiliar biological fluids and solids pass through, in various ergonomic receptacles. The most intimate aspects of personal care (kept private by most of us) are laid bare in the sluice.  As humans, we are trained to contain ourselves, to keep our abject selves in a state of some privacy and in control. The sluice is a space in which concentrated amounts of material from those who have temporarily or permanently relinquished this physical control may safely pass through. A sense of the unidentifiable extends beyond the contents of the bed pan, sick bowl or sputum cup. These receptacles and other pieces of equipment and fixtures found in the sluice are also unfamiliar. Large sinks, on the floor, large fabric bags clipped on to frameworks, bulging or ready to receive soiled textiles, commodes, hoists and piles and piles of clean unused absorbent chair pads, bedding, clothing and other hard to identify consumables. My work Sluice (1997) was made to evoke a sense of the unfamiliar in several ways. Although named after a room, the work is an object (or put more accurately, a set of identical objects). It makes references to both utility and the human body. It gives the illusion of being a container, or a fetish object, ready for a human body to leak into its imaginary possibilities. Each of the objects has an opening with a stopper identical to those found on hot water bottles, however, beyond the neck this rubberised object is studded all over with tiny, soft spikes, at one point the surface of each object disappears inwards revealing a hole in its side into which the studded surface disappears into the darkness of an interior cavity. Sluice is a hybrid of the utilitarian and the intimate. Is it made for comfort or sex?