Domestic life as a subject for art suggests a smug casserole of Cath Kidston prints and sentimentality: hints of amateurism, family portraits, tasteful still-life paintings. But a number of current exhibitions offer a more oppressive – even macabre – vision of domesticity, in which the home appears as a site of burden and confinement. That these sinister depictions of family space arise in exhibitions featuring a large number of female artists is by no means coincidental, but the experiences they draw on are as varied as the works themselves.
In Sussex Modernism, urban bohemians reject the soot-blackened, impersonal city to pursue a life of hand-making, socialism and sexual licence on the south coast. Charleston, home of artists and designers Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell, and country bolthole to the Bloomsbury Group, was conceived as an extended, collaborative artwork featuring hand-painted furnishings, and a textile designed by Bell and named White after suffragette Amber Blanco White.
So far so liberating, but Roland Penrose’s 1947 portrait of his heavily pregnant wife, the photographer Lee Miller, feels aggravated and restive. And a photograph taken by the former war reporter herself, five years later, from the window of their home in Sussex is dominated by the heavy leading that divides the glass, as if she were looking out over the English countryside through a cage.
Sculptor and printmaker Eric Gill’s abusive sexual relationship with his two eldest daughters casts his desire to live in a secluded rural community in a more sinister light. Seen in this context, a picture of Gill’s 17-year-old daughter Petra bathing radiates a quiet horror, reminding viewers that the impermeable retreat of the domestic environment offered Gill a sanctuary that Petra was denied.
The suggestion of intimate nastiness taking place behind closed doors also ripples through the exhibition Room at Sadie Coles HQ, where 15 female artists take on the titular dwelling-space. Andra Ursuta’s T, Vladimirescu Nr 5, Kitchen (2013), is a doll’s house-like recreation of the kitchen from her family home in Romania. The detail of this domestic scene is complete down to a tiny mincing machine. Ursuta does not tell us what took place within this kitchen, but has referred to her childhood as a difficult time, and recalls the eventual razing of the building to make way for a supermarket without regret.
There are many sources for darkness – real and imagined – in the homestead. Teenagers are well able to recast the familial setting as some hybrid of prison, surveillance state and city under siege. Klara Lidén’s Teenage Room (2009) offers appropriate solipsistic drama: the door is rigged with an axe-mounted booby trap, and the furniture within ineptly sprayed black.
Suspended full-size between the floor and ceiling of the gallery, Heidi Bucher’s, Untitled (Herrenzimmer) (1979) is the peeled façade of her father’s study: the dust, soot and debris lifted away on sheets of latex-impregnated cotton. Bucher was in her 50s when she made this shell of her father’s room: as a young mother she had reacted strongly against the staid domesticity of her own upbringing, and sought an alternative, art-centric model of family life. In returning to her family home years later, we find her forensically examining the domestic details of her own history.
Post-mortems of a different kind were perhaps on David Rayson’s mind when he painted Patio in 1998 – a decade in which the paved backyard became synonymous in the UK with the concealment of suburban homicide thanks both to a series of murders committed by Fred and Rose West in Gloucester, and to a sensational plotline in the soap opera Brookside. Exhibited as part of House Work, a home-themed group show at Victoria Miro, Patio is a grim study in homogenous perfection set against a concrete-grey sky. Rayson’s precise brushwork shows every tiny fleck of compost that has spilt on to the grey patio slabs, the little twist of blue plastic dropped into the herbaceous border, and the drips clustered along the edge of the white plastic table.
Equally tense is Mamma Andersson’s Pigeon House (2010), a painted interior in which every element jars. The decor seems arbitrary, and the three figures seated around a table have no evident reason to be there, nor apparent rapport. The domestic appearance feels like a masquerade but to imagine that this is a scene from a spy thriller is to ignore that the kitchen table is as much a site of anxiety, awkwardness, fury and pretense as any John Le Carré “safe house”.
At Turner Contemporary in Margate, Entangled, a show of textile-based work, holds beauty alongside the menace. Mona Hatoum’s 4 Rugs (made in Egypt) (1998/2015) are woven with the figures of contorted skeletons, as if in each crossing of the floor we stepped over the forgotten dead. In Kate MccGwire’s 2015 White Lies series, the artist pierces vintage lace doilies with the grey and vicious looking quills of pigeon feathers, turning them from decorative ornaments into orifices bristling with fangs or claws. As with David Rayson’s Patio, bourgeois propriety is suggested as a tightly knotted façade, distracting us from some unsavoury underlying truth.
Alongside the finger pointing, frustrated potential and claustrophobia however, there is also spirited reappropriation. Louis Bourgeois slices and restitches mattress ticking so that the stripes reform into a spider’s web. The bed is transformed into a sticky trap within which lurks the bitch-mother: Bourgeois’s giant spider. If there is anything to be feared in this domestic scenario, the suggestion is that it is Bourgeois herself, fierce and uncompromising.
Bourgeois is not the only late-career woman artist to claim the domestic macabre as personal territory: in Terrains of the Body at Whitechapel Gallery we find the 70-year-old Kirsten Justesen glowering from within a heavy wooden cupboard. In earlier years, Justesen fought to balance the demands of motherhood and the home with her performance work. Decades later we find her “on the shelf” alongside her archive, but rather than a dusty relic, she exudes latent power, and even sexual suggestion: white-haired she may be, but overlook her at your peril.
The shows
- Sussex Modernism: Retreat and Rebellion is at Two Temple Place, London, until 23 April.
- Room is at Sadie Coles HQ, London, until 18 February
- House Work is at Victoria Miro, London, until 18 March
- Entangled: Threads & Making is at Turner Contemporary, Margate, until 7 May
- Terrains of the Body: Photography from the National Museum of Women in the Arts is at Whitechapel Gallery, London, until 16 April
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