hink Plasticine. think long. chunky corrugated slabs of malleable colour. Squishable. rollable. the substance that's been kneaded by generations of hot little hands. conjuring figures in the shapes of their imagination. But New York artist Iillen (iallagher has reclaimed the medium from the preserve of kids. Taking advertising images from mid-20th century black American magazines such as lilmny. Our World and Sepia. she gives the heads fabulous new wigs. moulded from brilliant yellow Plasticine. Three hundred and ninety six black faces. often with wliited-out eyes. are crowned with a new. extravagant bonce. just as the adverts claim you will be transformed: ‘Makes hair look longer. livelier — in 2() seconds‘. ‘Metrolized (‘ream (iuarantees (ilamot‘ously Fairer Skin‘. ‘Jet Black and Brown . . . By Tonight!‘
The effect is to have a patchwork of crowned beauties winking. pouting. smiling and posing with empty eyes. Bttt don‘t read this as a critique of white aesthetic values being internalised by African Americans. ()r. at least not just this. ‘()ften black artists get really hinged to the shingle of race and the meaning in their work is seen as a literal reading of the signs.‘ says Gallager from her New York studio. ‘I always wanted to use signs that are historically known and have impact. but I want to slow them down and say something more personal or private. I‘m someone who builds things and I want people to look at both the way the work is tnade as content and not just the signs that slide across the face of it.‘
It‘s a pliysicality that can be seen in all of Gallagher‘s work. from the minutely carved. thick water-colour paper in the ‘Watery Iicstatic‘ series to the scratched films. sampling loops from Dizzee Rascal. Texture and pattern are crucial to Gallagher‘s art. You get the sense that she delights in getting stuck in with a scalpel. working away like a surgeon to bring her subjects back to life in a new way. ‘Basically. what I'm interested in doing is taking something that has its own fatigued history and reanimating it back again through a private language.‘ she says.
The private language has many characters — there‘s Pegleg Bates and Eunice Rivers. and they function as themselves — a black comedian and the nurse from the Tuskegee experiment (during which black men with syphilis were ushered into the medical system only to be denied treatment). but also as general characters — ‘a one-legged obsessive character“ and a ‘trickster figure‘. She says it‘s almost like a picaresque novel. The storytelling urge goes way back to when Gallagher was a girl hunting about in junkyards in her home town of Providence. Rhode Island. ‘I grew up with a white. Irish mother in a black neighbourhood that was on the water. but right under Freeway 95 that goes from Florida to Maine.‘ she says. ‘It cut through our town and there were these great jewellery factories and junkyards where there would always be these
“APOLLO” - No.99-S3. Stretch Wig
‘I'M INTERESTED IN TAKING SOMETHING WITH ITS OWN FATIGUED HISTORY AND REANIMATING IT THROUGH A PRIVATE LANGUAGE'
shiny things — heaps you could dig through right on the ocean. So it was like this ghetto on the sea. I just liked digging through the scrap yards and I always remember looking for shiny things and liked making stories and fantasies. but the ocean was always there.‘
The ocean and what lies beneath are crucial to Gallagher's work. It‘s what got her drawing in the first place — a college research trip took her to studying micro-species in the Caribbean which she documented in watercolour. In her recent 'Watery Ecstatic' series. delicate. floating forms swim and float in the depths of carved paper. I ask her if these were a
deliberate attempt to create something natural after the artificial subject matter of wigs. \o is the short answer. “The natural liistol‘} of the underwater creatures is a kind of double play on the idea of natural] she says. ‘My underwater world is made of people who went overboard during the Middle I’assage. I start thinking about this idea of irretrievable loss and w hats at the bottom of the ocean. 'l‘liere's this world that's made tip of all these bits and parts that will never re-enter again.‘ Io (iallager this is the most convincing origin myth. ‘.\'ot some kind of tantasised view of Mother Africa.~
The .Middle l’assage. the longest and most dangerous. squalid part of the journey for slaves being \hiPPed from .-\frica to .-\merica. has taken on a mythical significance of ultimate degradation and suffering. So something that is seen as elemental and pure the ocean —- is also a great harbourer of stories. "The Irish immigrants came over using the ships that were used during the Middle l’assage for slavery and they just re-tooled tliose ships and used them for Irish immigrants really creepy. lior me it becomes about the idea of mutability. passage and change.’
So 'natural‘ is a loaded word. In contrast to the hair—straightening. skin-lightening products of mid-century America. (iallaglier finds 7()s America just as perplexing. "I'here's a kind of play on the idea of natural. So that your own natural isn't natural enough. which. of course. as someone who's bi-racial I certainly relate to — you might have. (iod forbid. a saggy :Mt‘o or your curls weren‘t kinky enough and you couldn't get that fabulous Angela l)avis afro. They even sold afro wigs for children. which I thought was funny and perverted. So your own natural had to be hyper-natural. It‘s about this idea of freedom.‘ she says. 'If it‘s just in a sign it becomes constricted it has to be a fluid concept’
(iallagher‘s bid for fluidity comes through particularly strongly in her animations. In one film. Monster. she takes a l‘)5(ls ('old War B-movie. II ('(um’ l’mm ()utlu Space. in which a giant eyeball lands in an American town. slowly taking it over. and she scratches directly onto the film.
‘I basically hijacked the narrative and made this parallel alongside it. So there‘s these kind of eye beams and each time somebody's changed they get a new wig. Different film stocks have different colours embedded in them so I would scratch through and find blues or pinks. so it‘s really beautiful.‘ And don't underestimate this quality of (iallagher‘s work either. It‘s beautiful — strangely and subversively. The natural unnatural beauty pushed into the softness of l’lasticine. scratched into the brittleness of film and carved into the depths of paper. The stories are in the cut.
Ellen Gallagher - Orbis, Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh, Sat 11 Dec-Sun 14 Feb.
2— ’7. Di”, THE LIST 19