Brick hedging edging
The title of Louise Hubbard's installation at West Space refers to building processes and materials which the artist uses and brings undone. Hedging Edging is a building technique used in brick laying which produces stability, order and coherence in a structure. Hubbard's work explores ways of imposing order on space in the everyday, the emotional and in art. The instability of Hubbard's work rigorously addresses space and the site it occupies. Accompanying Hubbard's installation in the galley space is a textual glossolalia:
Wedgingsledgingglugingbridlinggroomingclip-
pingclubbing
dressage
assuage
collapsing
figure and ground and the basic system of train-
ing.
This text alludes to emotional memories of the care of horses, anxiety provoked by the instability of boundaries and to systems of training. The text contains uncertain connections between self and other, subject and object. It indicates the relationship between figure and ground in spatial arts such as sculpture and architecture and the training imposed to produce forms which are clearly delineated from their formless surroundings.
Hubbard's work is a visual glossolalia gleaned from found objects, refuse and detritus. She does not buy her materials. Nor does she make them more permanent by subjecting them to nailing or gluing. These materials interact to produce a floor drawing, a kind of map created from feeling and memories. The work is assembled from the spaces of domesticity, suburbia and childhood; sites which are also upsetting and disquieting. The tranquil and comfortable spaces that we work to produce also provoke discomfort. The radical ambiguity of Hubbard's assemblage is concerned with the fascination, trauma and even physical threat of the uncanny (unheimlich}. One encounters a Kantell stack: late modernist functional plastic chairs which the