Dirty Laundry

About

‘XX pinned me down to the ground, I quickly covered my face, knowing that my head should be protected.’

‘I've been taking Wellman since my twenties to support my health and hectic lifestyle’

 ‘Hey did you hear about that man greg who lived at number 21, he fell from a ladder off the side of his house.’

`` I was in a rush to get some tubs of yogurt plus other groceries from lidl, so quickly darted into the one opposite my studio in my dirty painting rags. I piled them in my arms and stood in the queue, but one tub fell to the floor  before I knew it and was quick enough to catch it, it smashed to the floor and all the contents splattered everywhere, on the man in front leg, the lady next to me shoes, my ankles, slippery mess. I felt so embarrassed, I tried to explain to the checkout women in german and she just looked at me with anger. I scrambled around for something to wipe it up, and then a shop assistant just nodded to me to leave it. I turned around and the old lady behind me huffed and puffed mumbling something in german, I could not really understand but thought I heard something about these foreigners..’

‘With you its always take, take,take’

‘It's hard to know what's best, because sometimes they grow back thicker and quicker.’

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Wells Projects is excited to present a solo show by London and Berlin-based artist Alice Morey, who transforms our space into an immersive abjectual network of whispering washing lines. Morey explores backyards of hanging laundry, stretching in a mosaiclike pattern across the urban landscape, as having a historically political function for women to exchange ideas freely while performing everyday maintenance work. By recreating this space of resistance, intimacy and community within Wells Projects, and extending it in the contemporary context to all identities, she is reflecting on our narrative of formerly occupied space, which in the future will be turned into a privately developed building. This work addresses ideas of power and spatial politics that is central to our concerns. 

Interested in interconnected/-contaminated, bodily environments, Morey creates an animate, floating structure of washing lines in the main space. Blending synthetic and organic references, such as plastic, herbs, tights, porcelain and digital projection, and playing with suggestive, anthropomorphic shapes, the washing lines are also interwoven by a water system through which the plastic will dissolve during the course of the exhibition, making it into a hybrid organism with an ecosystem of its own. The audience is invited to listen to her sound piece of automatic, diaristic meditations channeled through this intimate participatory network, emphasizing the meditative nature of repetitive domestic rituals and creating a space of interpersonal vulnerability. 

Her performance in the outdoor space takes a literal spin on “dirty laundry”, hanging pigskins from washing lines, covered in tattoos of Morey’s words, echoing the element of written expression and repetition that permeates the exhibition as a whole. Playing with the recurring interest of the dirty-in-the-clean, purity in decay, and the corpse as Abject in Morey’s practice, she is using the repulsive rotting skin of pigs as a grotesque symbol of resistance, uncanny eroticism and unapologetic sexuality. Pigs can also be seen as politically loaded symbolic gatekeepers for power, and for gendered, exclusive spaces or “clubs”- (if we think of David Cameron’s infamous pig encounter, or the animal being associated with wealth, greed and immorality) hung on display in all their lifeless defeat in a contrasted space of intimacy and inclusivity created together by Morey and the audience.

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Curated by Sonja Teszler