OUT OF THE RECTANGLE
Image courtesy of Gazelli Art House. Photos by Deniz Guzel.
Written by Liz Hoggard, Journalist and author
Review of Out of the Rectangle, Gazelli Art House, Dover Street, London W1 until 13 May 2023
‘We live in rectangles. Much of our visual art is bound by rectangles: billboards, images online, films, magazines, Fine Art… credit cards, passports, medical cards… Something so ubiquitous is worth questioning and disrupting,’ the British-American artist Jann Haworth writes in the introduction to her new show. After the Covid pandemic, Haworth says she felt the need to make softer pieces to get away from the rigidity of stretched canvas.
Image courtesy of Gazelli Art House. Photos by Deniz Guzel.
Haworth is regarded as a 1960s Pop Art pioneer . She began experimenting with sewn and stuffed soft sculptures while studying at the Slade. Her work, now in permanent collections including the Tate and the Walker Art Gallery, Minneapolis, often contains specific references to American culture and to Hollywood in particular, as well as challenging gendered stereotypes.
Frustratingly she is still perhaps best known as the ex-wife of Peter Blake. In 1963, whilst a student she met Blake at a party and they married months later. In 1967 they co-created the iconic album sleeve for the Beatles’ Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band , one of the most famous commercial artworks of the modern age (though Blake tends to get the credit).
Image courtesy of Gazelli Art House. Photos by Deniz Guzel.
Haworth created several cloth dummies for the album sleeve, including one of her ‘Old Lady’ figures and a Shirley Temple doll who wears a ‘Welcome The Rolling Stones’ sweater. Inspired by the municipal flower-clock in Hammersmith, west London, she came up with the idea of writing out the name of the band in flower-bed lettering.
And now, sixty years after her first London show at the Institute of Contemporary Art, her new show, Out of the Rectangle combines historic works with newly commissioned pieces.
Haworth is ever-conscious of the residual borderline between arts & crafts and fine art, where she senses a ‘divide is still present, even now, after decades of redefining and pressure from great fibre artists, ceramicists, weavers and the rest’.
She has always loved textiles. Her mother Miriam Haworth was a distinguished ceramist, printmaker, and painter who taught her how to sew. ‘I was eight when I made my first petticoat, and from that point on I made dolls, their clothing and almost everything I wore.’
Image courtesy of Gazelli Art House. Photos by Deniz Guzel.
In 2019 she told an interviewer, how discovering cloth at art school set her apart from her male peers. 'What thrilled me about cloth was that in the face of the air of male superiority at the Slade – I knew a whole language of expression that my male colleagues had no inkling of. I knew the language of cloth inside out. I knew how to turn two-dimensional flat fabric into any shape that I needed to create a 3-D object/figure/concept. I knew this opened the door to a vast territory of expression.’
Today her materials include mid-tone duck-cream linen canvas, unbleached calico, Japanese indigo fabric, gesso, rabbit skin glue. She vividly recreates the natural colours of the desert country, near where she lives today in Sundance, Utah, with old master oils, some of them ground from rock.
The show includes six new painted fabric hangings. There’s a striking life-size mixed-media corset, made from oil on linen and cotton canvas (2022) where interlocking crosses take the place of ‘limbs’. There are elements of surrealist cut-up here, but this body feels all-woman.
Haworth told The Art Newspaper, the cloth strips are cut and stitched from larger pieces, where she let splashes happen in a loose, gestural way, in the manner of Japanese calligraphy, before selecting a ‘highly precious’ piece of the cloth and bringing it ‘into a straitjacket’ by cutting and stitching. ‘I like the contrast between that very loose event, then the very strict sixteenth-of-an-inch precision.’
A freestanding mannequin (oil-painted canvas over a seamstress dummy) is clambering into her dress. Faceless, she has no legs , but stands defiant, her hair a Medusa tangle of fabric ribbons.
Two giant ‘art cloaks’, stitched and painted on cotton canvas, are made up of stencilled scenes from the movies. ‘Colour Film Cloak’ (2023) takes film stills, from classic Wild West movies. Much of Haworth’s work deconstructs the myth of the Wild West and the American cowboy (where white pioneers stole land from Indigenous Americans). While 'Black and white Film Cloak' recreates sepia images from films such as Bonnie and Clyde.
Image courtesy of Gazelli Art House. Photos by Deniz Guzel.
Haworth’s childhood was spent on film sets in Hollywood. Her father, Ted Haworth won an Academy Award for Best Art Direction for Sayonara (1957) and was nominated for his work on Marty (1955) and Some Like It Hot (1959). The young Jann met stars including Marlon Brando and Marilyn Monroe and was inspired by the creativity that happened 'behind-the-scenes' from special effects to prop and costumes.
‘This influenced my work in the 1960s. I thought of the installations that I did as film sets. The concept of the stand-in, the fake, the dummy, the latex model as surrogates for the real, came from being with my father.’
A touching sofa sculpture in the top gallery of Gazelli Art House is a ‘portrait’ of her grandmother, originally shown at her 1963 ICA show (Old Lady, 1962/3) . The face and hands, fleshed out in ribbons and lace, turn the vicissitudes of old age into something beautiful.
Haworth is an advocate for feminist rights and women’s representation in the art world. Her Mannequin Defectors (2008) comic strip shows corseted mannequins from shop windows protesting with placards and at one point marching in front of a mural of noteworthy women from different fields.
More recently she’s created diptych-style fabric and cardboard collages inspired by the experiences of the 2017 Women’s March (cardboard is her chosen medium to reflect the protest signs carried by many).
Image courtesy of Gazelli Art House. Photos by Deniz Guzel.
She’s less bothered by the misattribution of the Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band album sleeve, than the fact that, out of the 65 people shown on the album cover, only 12 are women, and half of them fictional.
So she and her artist-daughter, Liberty Blake, have been working on a new commission for the National Portrait Gallery - the 28ft, seven-panel mural, Work in Progress, which will be unveiled when the Gallery reopens in June, showcasing 130 inspiring women (Mary Quant, Zadie Smith, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Amelia Earhart).
Part of Reframing Narratives: Women in Portraiture, a project to enhance the representation of women in the NPG’s Collection, the mural has been created in colleges and local community groups across the UK, by 250 women, many amateur artists.
The pandemic meant Haworth and Blake had to conduct workshops over Zoom from the US. Without the artists watching over their shoulders, participants were able to make their own stencils, which in turn makes each face recognisable yet distinctive.
For Haworth, it is important this project remains unfinished, ‘a work in progress’, because it would impossible to correct centuries of history that have left women out. A typically democratic gesture from such an influential artist.
Out of the Rectangle is on at the Gazelli Art House, Dover Street, London W1 until 13 May 2023