Vanishing Points

Pip Culbert stands at the forefront of deconstructive art with work spanning many decades. Her work in linear art explores all aspects of fundamental constructions, deconstructions and perspectives of objects. It is the essence of the perspective that pervades throughout her work.

Over the years, Pip’s work has gained international attention, and her unique pieces have featured in many significant exhibitions and their catalogues, including ‘Software’ in France, Linen Line, at the Sofa Gallery Christchurch in New Zealand, ‘The Secret Life of Clothes, Artium Fukuoka in Japan and a commission for Allianz, in Berlin, a permanent installation of Seams, which runs the length 750 meters of a corridor.

In this article we find out how mass industrialisation, two world wars and the 60’s influenced the work of this profound artist.

Mathematics and perspective have all played a crucial part in the evolution of visual arts. It wasn’t until the 14th century that artists fully grasped the nature of perspective, applying linear techniques in the creation of grids where perspective could be tilted which ever way to represent a realistic image without distortions and the appearance of flatness. Artists through the centuries have built on this creating profound works of art.

The 20th century was a time of revolution in the arts influenced by mass industrialisation and the two world wars. Artists looked to incorporate what was happening around them. For many conventional art material wasn’t enough and they set about finding new ways of creating that work. Found objects became works of art or sculpture, the most famous being Marcel Duchamp, exhibiting ‘Fountain’ a men’s urinal, as part of an Avant-Garde show in 1914.

“The creative act is not performed by the artist alone; the spectator brings the work in contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualifications and thus adds his contribution to the creative act” Marcel Duchamp

Radical thoughts reflected radical times. After the Second World War, post war Britain faced many challenges and artists were no exception. Painters, sculptures, architects were faced with challenges of reconstruction of a battered Britain. Scarcity of material and the need for speedy reconstruction forced artists and technicians to consider new material. The maelstrom of activity had profound impact on generations of artists to come. The 50’s and 60’s saw a stability which allowed artists to build on ideas interrupted by the war. For many, the 60’s were a turning point.

Graduating with a degree in Industrial design in Engineering at the Royal College of Art in 1961, Pip’s work has evolved to encompass perspectives, art history, deconstruction and the human condition. Found objects have played a major part in Pip Culbert’s work and rubbish dumps are one of her favourite haunts.

The vast repertoire of Pip’s work contains deconstructions of found objects such as loose covers, clothes, tents, parachutes, bags, pockets and handkerchiefs, brought to their skeletal being leaving the seams, hems and labels. Ghost like presence of the shapes adorns walls as isometric line drawings are left on hangers as low relief sculptures.

In “Fossils” Decharge de Banon Installation, Pip’s uncanny eye captures the remains of garments abandoned at the entrance over run by heavy trucks, flattening them where they appear as ‘fossils’. Glancing at the images leaves a melancholic feeling of lost bodies that were once adorned by the discarded clothes.

Reviewing Pip’s exhibition at SoFA in 2004, Roger Boyce writing in “Art in America” comments that “aside from the optical and illusionary delight that they provide, Culbert’s wares give rise to historical recollection. Tents, awnings, trunks and cushions bring to mind nomadic accommodations, expeditions, hunting camps, celebrations and feasts. Culbert removes the “flesh” of these culturally rich objects, reassembling their structural “skeletons” into study mounts, like the pedagogic reconstructions found in natural displays. In doing so, she privileges conceptual speculation over physical utility – in effect sacrificing the corporeal life of her goods for their ideational potential”.

Pip’s trade mark of bringing garments to their very essence brings into play geometry, history and memory making a comment on the presence of humanity and the human condition. In “Jargon” White Shirt (Seams), part of the Software series, the piece at first appears fragile. But on a closer inspection it is robust and tenacious.

Patricia Brignone observes that “If we consider that inversion is the art of playing with paradoxes, the work of Pip Culbert is a perfect example of this. Her ghostly shapes, emptied of their contents and beautifully presented, release the silent presence of the garment and a body in the negative. This upsets established limits and liberates subjective inventions, throwing down a challenge to the tamed strangeness of the world.”

In Pip’s most recent collection of images available exclusively from The Art Ministry, items of clothing are photographed in natural surroundings in poses their previous occupants may have taken. The “Dressed Chairs” series, in which the garments are composed sitting on chairs, capture the imagination of the viewer and fit neatly into our perception of who wore it and what their life was like. There are dressed chairs holding a conference “Pale Blue 5 Conference”; dressed chair in a red dress “Diva (with Pereal)”, dressed chairs coming back; dressed chairs leaving; “Jump Suit Wandsworth Arndale” series raises the perception to a more tragic level by depicting a jumpsuit tangled in a tree below a skyscraper.

These images are minimalist yet speak a thousand truths. They are an intense characterisation of humanity; full of humour, tragedy, movement and compassion. The chair with the red dress for example, is a perfect personification of society’s view of a confident, glamorous, materialistic and ambitious woman. However it evokes your compassion because instead of being surrounded by admirers she is alone exposed in the open she is now on display and sexualised by the red dress. Pip creates her artwork to invert the viewer’s perception of reality and this image is a classic in her repertoire.

The lengthy discourse often dedicated to her work highlights the distinctive nature of a practice that demands further analysis. “Pip Culbert’s lesson to us is that less is more,” says Patricia Brignone. “Although sharing with the minimalists the same taste for the essential, as presented by unencumbered simple forms, Pip’s work, so full of humour and poetry, has very little in common with modernist reduction as practised by the exponents of ‘cool’ art”. Her work shows an attraction to the hidden side of things, deconstructing reality to shed light on that which is usually ignored”.

For further information on Pip Culbert visit her website and view her full collection of linear art and photographs.

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© 2007 Shakila Maan/The Art Ministry. All rights reserved.