IT'S NOT uncommon for artists to incorporate a "found object" or "ready-made" into a piece of work from time to time, but few use them as extensively as Cathy Wilkes. The Glasgow-based artist, who represented Scotland in the 2005 Venice Biennale, mak
es installations which are "assemblages" of found objects, often exploring elements of female experience or identity.
Prices, her new work currently showing at the Modern Institute, is structured around a supermarket check-out counter.
The conveyor belt is littered with dirty plates and bowls, some with children's plastic spoons in them. A naked female mannequin is turned away from us, one hand extended, dirty with the same decaying foodstuff. There's a Somerfield shopping basket at her feet. On the floor in front of her, a heart shape has been bashed into yellow plaster, its edges dotted with cockleshells.
What might we make of this? We won't get any help from Wilkes, who refuses to discuss or put any interpretation on her work. But it's not hard to put a basic feminist reading on this: is it not a study of the pressures on modern women to work, earn, raise children and still look like size zero mannequins? Society's relentless drive to consume, ignoring the costs? The tightening of purse strings at the till as the credit crunch keeps biting?
This is so easy that it's too easy. Wilkes' work is rich in its attention to detail: the smear of food on a bowl which has been emptied but not washed, a scatter of shells, a sprinkling of crumbs. Her arrangement of objects is also more complex, more disharmonious than it first appears. Some items suggest that it works on a number of different levels: that heart in plaster, crucifix shapes marked on two stacks of tiles. And there is the female figure, vulnerable and powerless in its plastic nakedness, a few strands of hair conspiring to make it more human and more pathetic.
Staying to look longer, I'm put in mind of the ties which bind women to domestic drudgery: love, both the misplaced dream of romance, and the grittier sense of familial obligation; the structures of tradition and belief that hem us in although we barely notice them, embedded so deep they can be neither fully acknowledged nor entirely thrown off.
Wilkes is in the process of creating her own artistic language with objects; every new work extends her lexicon. While some objects are clearly metaphors, others have a more personal resonance which no-one but Wilkes herself might recognise. This work might not seem to move on the feminist dialogue very much, but its strength is that even those with little background in contemporary art will be able to take a view on it. The concept of a female soul, lost somewhere between the home and the supermarket, is sadly all too familiar.
Photographer Michael Wildman has a very different take on female identity in his current show at Atticsalt, inspired by Rodin's Crouching Woman, a strangely intimate, ungainly sculpture of a female nude that was one of the works the artist himself most cherished.
Wildman began to photograph ordinary women in poses approximating to Rodin's, in locations with which they felt "spiritually connected". Gradually this work grew to a sequence of 27 crouching women.
It is useful to compare these with the other examples of Wildman's work here, many of which also feature the female nude: a perfect alabaster body curled in the knot of a tree or perched among the ruins of a cottage. These images are meticulously staged to create rich contrasts of tone and texture. The relationship of artist and model is much as it has always been: she is there to help him achieve his desired image.
The Crouching Women photographs are different. Artistically, they are interesting particularly in their choice of location: a Swedish woman in a scrap metal yard; a Latvian woman on a stony beach; a Polish woman in a burned-out caravan, an Italian woman on top of a dining room table; a French woman poised on top of a tiny pedestal table in a neo-classical doorway.
But here the women are in the driving seat. The artist allowed them to set the boundaries, to create their own interpretation of Rodin. A wall is devoted to documentary material displaying their written accounts of the experience: they use words like "proud" and "liberating". In relinquishing his power and entering into a collaboration with them, Wildman has passed up perfect textures and tones but has been rewarded with something more interesting.
For these "ordinary" women, the act of being photographed nude was about more than the physical act of taking clothes off in public. It opened up issues of body image, freedom and constraint, expectation and affirmation. The result feels very different to Cathy Wilkes' naked mannequin. It's less to do with lost souls, more to do with souls found.
&149 Cathy Wilkes until 6 September; Michael Wildman until 19 July
The full article contains 863 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
