Bed Folly for the Chronic Subject

When viewing art standing, in a gallery space, one is upright, perhaps self-conscious, moving from a to b, still for a moment just enough to gage or engage before moving along. Standing for too long forces any body into a state of discomfort. People tend to spend more time lying down than in any other position. To enable a prolonged relationship with the painting, the viewer is made entirely comfortable. 

 

The structure opens up conversations about rest, care, pain, fatigue, passivity, resistance, sexuality and vulnerability. 

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Time is an important part of my artistic practice. The time it takes to rest between things, for my body to balance itself back into equilibrium. 

 

The origin of the term chronic lies in the Greek word ‘Kronos’ meaning ‘time’. Crip time is to experience a non-normative relationship to linear, chronological time, development, and progress. Crip time is an alternate durational logic for many disabled people, speaking to the time one must take to rest before and after a journey, to extra-plan, to put out and take down their props of pain relief. 

 

Bed Folly for the Chronic Subject invites you to spend time with the painting, as long as you wish, and does so by ensuring you are entirely comfortable during your experience of it. A mattress of memory foam and a view made for you, a dreamscape of reclining friends floating in a sea of flowing rugs. You empathise with their floating position through the support of your own body. 

 

The figures in the painting recline and float in nudity. They are hidden from view until you lie with and beneath them. Nudity has many second order meanings: sexuality, vulnerability, freedom. Without clothing, the naked body has no signifier of time, of period of context. They float. 

 

In “The Reclining Nude” Emma Wilson writes that "The reclining nude is an image of passivity, of submission, of hedonism. It allows thought about passivity as pleasure, about depression and grief figured posturally, about indolence as a form of resistance and anarchy." Passivity is defined as ‘acceptance of what happens, without active response or resistance’. Passivity as pleasure is interesting in that it speaks to the absence of action, of use, of waste. The pleasures of wasted time. The resistance acts of lack of action. The body on strike.

 

The act of reclining in public speaks to a kind of active resistance, and response to the hostile conditions of contemporary public space, a spatial anarchy. An alarm bell ringing, something must be wrong, you are not supposed to be there, not like that. I have been ‘moved on’ too many times to remember and once even mugged. At worst people don’t want you there, at best people offer to call an ambulance. Can I not rest in peace? 

 

Bed Folly for the Chronic Subject is the length of my body, 160cm, it is made from up-cycled timber, a three layered lower frame with a space for dirty shoed feet to poke out the bottom and sides, then uprights and an upper frame with the canvas stretched and inset facing the body. The height of the bed folly is set to give the passerby a glimpse of the artwork ceiling, but they must lie down to see it fully. They must adjust their body to participate. 

 

Made in collaboration with The Folly Building Workshop, a self-build initiative that works with up-cycled material and local communities.