FINE ART: Tracy Murinik
MAKING the proverbial splash is taken a step further by Bridget Baker in her latest exhibition at the Hnel Gallery this month. The gallery space has been cleared to accommodate an installation, introduced by a placard on a plinth bearing the artist’s academic credentials in front of a large, round portapool that has been filled and sprinkled with embroidered kick-boards.
Despite the spectacle of a swimming pool in a gallery (and the implications this poses for the custodians of an art gallery), this is not an unsubtle work. It hints, layeredly, at various dimensions of the artist’s experience, personal and, more broadly, of South African-type suburbia. It explores the fragile bases upon which self- identity is constructed and represented.
Over a year, Baker has painstakingly embroidered a selection of her personal certificates on to 16 semi-inflated plastic kickboards – among them her birth certificate; a graduation certificate from the University of Stellenbosch; first prize for swimming one length of breaststroke – that float languidly in the pool. These certificates talk of small triumphs; some more modest than others.
They also talk of the stress placed upon children to achieve and perform at a very early age. They hint at something absurdly comical about the overwhelming competitive spirit generated by parents and in schools and fostered through the institutions of school galas and music eisteddfods; the anxiety of needing to prove oneself worthy, active, accomplished. In other words, how one is taught to buy into the delusive path of social acceptance and acceptability via the currency of performance and achievement.
Baker exposes that the ways we learn to construct our various identities, public and private (accepting that these are never entirely fixed or inseparable) are based on the ways we learn to speak of ourselves, describe ourselves and create a concrete image of who we are within the places that we work and live.
The press release for this exhibition describes the artist as using ”swimming aids as a metaphor for vulnerability”. In connection with this, Baker makes an autobiographical reference to a traumatic loss at an early age. Embroidered on a towel in another work at the back of the gallery is an excerpt from a nursery school report called Developmental Chart (Contd.): ”Intellectual activity, 5yrs, fluent: can describe an incident”.
The vulnerability of boundaries contained within the image of the swimming pool makes reference to the fluidity of memory and the need to control or keep in check the memories of one’s traumas, to maintain the safe balance and avoid an overspill.
This little pool of achievement contains some of the small official signifiers that account for our existence. They signal the paranoid obsession to prove our worth, our professional and social legitimacy; to constantly justify ourselves to parents, teachers, colleagues … They signal, too, our dependence upon that acceptance.
A few days after the opening, someone has thrown a coin into the water. A wishing well seems to me an appropriate added dimension.
Bridget Baker’s work is on show at the Hnel Gallery, Cape Town, until May 30