October 2022
Pillow Talk Exhibition
Abstract Thoughts Gallery, Darlinghurst
Breakfast in bed
Jennifer Brady, Chelsea Coon, J Davies, Jamila Main, Nicola Smith
I roll over and hit the snooze button on my phone.
I hit it again 5-minutes later.
I stir as my inner consciousness reminds me that ‘Pillow Talk’ is opening in a few days and I desperately need to write the essay I’ve been avoiding. I hop out of bed, shuffle towards the kitchen. I feed the cats and take my medication. I groggily wander back to my bed and lean down to the floor where my laptop lays discarded from the night before. I sit in bed and open a word doc. The cursor blinks at me, and I blink back at it as my eyes focus and the fogginess of sleep wears off. I begin to think about the bed.
Some food for thought:
I think of all the mattresses left curb-side, and how I saw seven in one night walking through Lewisham last Thursday.
I think of wealth disparity and homelessness, and how many people could find solace in these cast offs.
I think of all the hours, minutes, seconds spent in bed.
The average person will spend 26 years sleeping, and spend 7 trying to fall asleep. That means we will spend a total of 33 years in bed. Based on this, I haven’t been alive as long as I will spend in bed. I am in deficit.
I think of different bed sizes; a cot for a baby, a single for a child, bunk beds if you don’t have the space, queen or kings for adults, and a super king if you’re privileged.
I think of a warming cup of coffee resting on my chest as I slouch in bed, and of the plentiful cups that often pile on the bedside table next to me.
The bed is where we dream, have nightmares.
I think of the many instances I have daydreamed in bed and imagined alternative realities. Contemplating the future and dwelling on the past.
It is where people often pray.
It is where I entered the world and (statistically) where I will exit it. It is where I start my day and finish it.
Beginnings and ends.
I think of how an unmade bed proposes a user – of personhood. The bed lies in the terrain of the living and the lived.
I think of all of those I have shared a bed with; my parents, my brothers, friends, lovers, exes, pets, and those that I will in time.
I think of site-specificity and the notion that we have dedicated rooms for beds; is it my room or the bed’s room?
I wonder if beds have sentience or a consciousness beyond their defined object-ness? Are they performers? Do they have a conscience?
I remember having nightmares and jumping into my parent’s bed for comfort as a child.
I remember being sent to bed as a kid as a form of discipline.
I recall my brothers’ toes hanging over the end of the bed as they grew and think about this as a metric of growth, or a measure of time.
I ponder transitory beds, that of hotels, and the short stays of visitors.
I think of John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s Bed-ins for Peace, and the vivid image of them peacefully protesting from the comfort of their hotel beds.
I think about how no one's bed looks the same.
I ponder my bed currently, and the choices I have made to personalise it; from my choice of mattress, pillows, headboard, duvet cover, sheets, and even where it is placed as the focal point in my bedroom.
I think about the moment I am currently in, wishing someone would bring me breakfast in bed, yet I find myself sitting in bed, writing about beds. How meta.
I think about how the bed recalls the past; our experiences leaving traces upon and within it. Period stains. Coffee stains. Ink stains. Sweat stains. Cum stains.
I think about the bed as a refuge, a momentary escape from the world. The covers feel like all the protection I need some days.
I think of the numerous times I have said – “I just want to go home and jump into bed”
I think about hopping into tightly made beds, pulling the sheets up, wiggling and writhing to loosen its tension.
I think about the transitory power of the bed, moving from innocent to sexual and back again. The bed is an instinctive place – where we have sex and masterbate.
A place of conception and deception.
I think about new sensations, pleasure and sexual memories.
I think of lost virginities and virtue.
I think of Frida Kahlo’s work ‘Henry Ford Hospital (La cama volando)’ (1932), depicting her miscarriage in bed. I think of the numerous photos I have seen of Kahlo painting in bed, easel propped as she lay bed bound.
I think of Tracey Emin’s confronting work ‘My Bed’ (1998) and think about what my iteration would look like: a messy bed with green gingham and white bedding, several cups stacked with the remnants of the dark liquids that once filled them, a tangle of chargers, a painting I haven’t gotten around to hanging yet, yesterday’s clothing, my bra, an empty drink bottle, an unpaid parking fine, and the laundry I have been blissfully ignoring.
I think about the bed I shared with my ex.
Early-morning cuddles; big spoon, little spoon.
I think about how we often divide the bed in relationships, each person having ‘their side’.
I remember holding my ex when they were ill, brushing their hair with my fingers to soothe them. I remember the smell of their shampoo embedded within the fibres of the pillow case.
I think of the times I made them sleep on the couch instead; as I cried into the pillow.
I remember sitting at the end of the bed telling them it was over.
Beginnings and ends.
I think of the many selves I have encountered here, and the catalytic capacity of the bed in accruing a sense of who we are.
I recall restlessness and being unable to fall asleep.
Lying awake.
We usually associate the bed with sleep or rest. However, the bed serves as an essential stage, a multipurpose fulcrum in our lives. Pillow Talk explores this existential architecture as a place or territory that silently witnesses life’s moments, rhythms and cycles. We occupy this space within the banality of the everyday; from birth to death, for love and pleasure, through comfort and discomfort.
Together the artists in Pillow Talk invite us under the covers into the unseen, the vulnerable, the private and the intimate to offer us a heartfelt familiarity, closeness, and softness. Revealing and concealing our identities, the bed performs a vital role in mediating the constantly shifting relationships between the self, others, and the world we inhabit, where the conscious and subconscious become blurred and diffused.
The bed experiences our lives, both as an active participant and bystander, through corporeal dependency and the long durations of time we often spend in it; from sleep to mundane scrolling on our phones. This gives it a multitude of intimate associations and affinities, each specific to every one of us who inhabits a bed. We place upon our beds our daily rituals and routines; they are interwoven with all other elements that sustain us.
You are invited into a bedroom; a spatially intimate, private space. This place, much like the bed, is duplicitous and dichotomous. We can often consider the bed to be divided – left or right, yours or mine, top or bottom – reflecting various binaries imbued. There is often an internal tension between never wanting to get out of bed, and the guilt of sleeping in. Some beds are occupied and others not. The private, inside world is now open to the public, outside world. The hard clanging of a metal bed frame juxtaposes the softness and visceral cloudiness of bedding and drapery. There is pleasure and pain, solitude and company. Yet, all the beds are messy and unmade, suggestive of lives being lived.
The inner monologues of Jennifer Brady’s work ‘Untitled’ (2022), rest in that dazed state where you are on the precipice of sleep, but not exactly awake. It is between here and there that quiet, tangential and intrusive thoughts often become loud and known. The embroidered rhetoric is personal to the artist; intimate, yet common to all. These ephemeral, often contradictory thoughts — sometimes generative, sometimes destructive — can often be interrupted by a shift in consciousness, leading them to become unfinished. Often, we remember the beds we have occupied in years past, just as we remember what conversations or events took place on them. Traces in materials hold and communicate these memories, embedded within their fibres, drawn forth and reanimated by the artist. Repurposing an old mattress protector from her childhood bed — stained with traces of ink from a leaking pen and yellowing with age — Brady reflects on changing habitation and traversing temporalities; from the bed she slept in as a child, to that as an adult, to the shared bed she currently occupies with a partner.
Chelsea Coon negotiates the passage of time through ‘big break’ (2022) a durational performance of endurance which sees the artist position and reposition a pre-fabricated bed frame for 37 minutes and 17 seconds. As Coon struggles to move the bed frame, vivid memories spring to mind of the many instances of attempting to redesign my bedroom at 3am as a child, and the exertion of labouring over an object. Embodying this tension, the skeletal, bare-bones structure acted upon in Coon’s performance is void of the warmth and softness we often associate with the bed space, reinforced by the abrasive reverberations of the sound of the object hitting and screeching across the concrete floor. The bodily act witnessed is uncomfortable, taxing, suggesting that the bed has the potential to create physical experiences that are unpleasant, isolating, and even painful. Throughout the duration of the performance, the bolts become loose, the frame bends and warps in the artist’s hands, it engages her muscles and causes discomfort, until the object and the body have endured their limits. Our perception of the bed frame morphs and transforms throughout the process, changing to a viewfinder, a window, an obstacle.
J Davies’ series of 35mm photographs invites us in. The artist asks us to ponder on our intimate relationships with and within our beds, providing us with glimpses into the ways we often exist and interact in our bedrooms; our safe spaces. The transitory power of the bed as an active site becomes apparent as it moves from sexual to platonic, explorative to restorative, for making love and for respite. It can be occupied singularly or shared. Relationships can be manifold and encounter varied degrees of intimacy between friends, lovers and the self. Gently voyeuristic, the works ‘Fran & Lucy in Dalat’ (2022), ’James & Karlo in Brunswick’ (2019) and ‘Kitty & Jordan in Brunswick I & II’ (2020), suggest a close intimacy, with the latter two
caught in sensual moments of fervour. In the photograph ‘Self Portrait during Lockdown #1’ (2020), the artist reminds us that although the bedroom space is a place of privacy and concealment, it also has the agency to expose and reveal; exploring the public, private and the performative self in-between. Evocative of the many intimate moments we have shared with ourselves in our personal spaces, the bed is often a space of discovery where we navigate our sexuality, our desires, our identity, and our being. In the work, ‘Unmade bed post intimacy’ (2020), the bed is impressed with indentations that suggest someone recently occupied it, with its sheets crumpled and messy, surrounded by the detritus of life; the bed performs an absent body, as if someone just got out of it.
The bed can be a place of illness, of confinement, a place ambivalent in nature or filled with imperilment. Within their work ‘Pillow Talk’ (2022), Jamila Main invites us into bed, to dive under the covers, to encounter a shared moment of vulnerability and intimacy as they recite confessional poetry, charting the flare up of emotional and physical pain. Whilst lying in a bed, resembling the one the artist resides in, the participant engages in one-on-one format with the artist via a computer screen, where Main shares without reticence the complexities of sapphic yearning, tethered to a disabled, chronically ill, queer body in persistent pain. In bed, the artist periodically moves positions, grimacing in pain between sharing personal dialogues and pillow talk, intended for a partner or lover, who we as the participant have become. Within moments of the rhetoric, the artist stumbles between ‘my’ and ‘our’, indicating the fluxes between plurality and ownership that can occur within relationships and the bed space. Letting us peek into the rarely seen landscape of disabled intimacy, the artist speaks to pleasure, love, desire, sex, and connection, and also to disconnect and heartbreak. This disconnection is amplified by engaging the artist via a screen; however, perhaps this is not too unfamiliar coming out of a time of pandemic and forced periods of isolation.
Nicola Smith’s cinephilic oil paintings from the series ‘I waited for something to happen’ (2020) capture moments from the 1975 film Je tu il elle, the first feature by Belgian filmmaker Chantal Akerman. The passage of time is centralised in the film as the protagonist played by Akerman herself is situated in a small apartment, describing how she moved all of the furniture out of the room until there was only a mattress left on the floor. Some days or weeks pass, she lies on the mattress and writes and rewrites letters to her former lover, proceeding to eat sugar out of a paper bag. I don’t know about you, but this feels oddly relatable to post- breakup binges in bed, consuming exorbitant amounts of junk food under the covers in between periods of tears. There is an interesting interplay between how Akerman has used the bed as a setting and Smith’s re- interpretation of it as a subject. By painting film stills a few seconds apart, Smith has effectively slowed time, suspended it, elongating the minutes and seconds passing us by. It is resonant of the hours (upon hours) we spend lazing in bed, and the drifting, fleeting consumption of time. Although seemingly repetitious, the reimaging of the film’s colour scheme between each work and subsequent film still, as well as painting each scene intuitively, indicates that Smith’s paintings are not interested in direct iteration, but rather in capturing how no two moments can ever be exactly the same, no matter how closely they may have occurred.
Casually, silently, continuously. The bed infiltrates our everyday experiences as a site of individual associations and references – no one’s sleep, dreams, or nightmares are the same. Evocative of emotional and temporal experiences, many of which are profoundly memorable, the bed resonates for many as a location of immense intimacy and vulnerability. The artists in Pillow Talk invite us into these private worlds, exploring their relationships with and within their beds.
_________
Okay, I’m tired.
I’m going to go to bed now.