The following is a brief preview - the full content of this page is available to premium users only.
Click here to subscribe...
Jill Barker's latest installation at the Ipswich Gallery continues a series of shows that display girls' dresses in various configurations. In Childsplay nine mass produced 'best' dresses for four year olds are suspended within hanging Perspex frames that run parallel with three walls of the gallery space. These collectables from the 1950s are lit so that their transparent fragility and decorative details are gently rather than starkly highlighted. Upon entering the gallery space the dresses appear to be floating in ether-like relics from a barely remembered past. But upon moving closer, as one is compelled to do by this intriguing scene, the dresses are transformed, or rather, disfigured before your eyes. This is because Barker had added her own 'decorative' touches to the lace trimmings, faded whites, and delicate pastel patterns of the dresses. The rather brutal strokes of Elizabethan blackwork embroidery infiltrate their almost transparent synthetic fabrics. And, as the artist's statement informs us, the embroidery is executed in a manner that displays minimal finesse or care, while the various motifs are hardly nursery friendly. The black embroidery is placed haphazardly with little concern for the 'original' design or the tasteful decorative enhancement of the dresses. In fact, from some angles the black stitching looks like an amorphous stain or haze of mildew that has seeped into and marred the delicate, faded fabrics. But when viewed at very close range certain patterns and motifs do materialize out of these formless blemishes. Some emerge as masses of miniature cone-like eruptions, others as row upon row of undulating and circular lines clustered around a pocket, taking over a bod1ce or weighing down a hem. Certainly, the girlish precocity evoked by these