Goodman Gallery
09.07 - 14.09.2024
Georgina Maxim’s Telling Moments is on at Goodman Gallery in London until September, at street level, just next to the stairs, and opposite where the gallery assistant sits, in that weird part of Mayfair characterised by commercial galleries, gleaming pavement (you can literally see the gallery interns sweeping them every morning if you time it right) and very, very expensive handbags. So: a room of clothing, but they’re not clothes – look again. Here is a shirt, butterflied and filleted, draped and fastened – or most of a shirt, anyway, its armscye barely recognisable. Here are flounces and frills of so many skirts, gathered into each other, their pleats and folds magnified by their assembly. These works are like skins, stretched onto tanning frames, their edges pulled taut and the clever tricks of their construction laid bare for us to see. They’re both under tension and draped, which is interesting, and they wear it a bit awkwardly, put upon. This kind of applique does not facilitate the kind of fluidity required to drape, and so the undulations of these surfaces look like model landscapes, their creases hard-won. I catch myself trying to see the shapes of the original garments below the embroidery when I look at them – is that a collar? And then – a button band?
Installation View, Georgina Maxim, Telling Moments, 2024. Goodman Gallery, London.
Maxim’s show at Goodman follows her inclusion in the recent group exhibition Unravel: The Power and Politics of Textiles in Art at the Barbican, also in London, which travels to the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam later this year. Part of an increasing turn toward the woven, Unravel brought together over 100 works by 50 different practitioners in service of looking more closely at the medium of textiles, which is, of course, both universal and intoxicatingly precise. Maxim forms part of a cohort of artists working with skills more traditionally associated with craft, and that funny phrase ‘women’s work’. Her practice, though connected to a lineage of practitioners like Rosemary Mayer, Louise Bourgeois, Magdalena Abakanowicz and Sheila Hicks, is extraordinarily specific to her living and working in Zimbabwe. (Craft practices are, it should be noted, more often highly specific than not.)
Georgina Maxim, They are both good and bad, 2021
Maxim’s primary technique is ‘dhunge mutunge’, a Shona phrase for a temporary stitching technique. From Telling Moments’s press release: ‘This is a stitch used for putting things together quickly so that they hold. It has been used for generations to create a temporary hold on torn items, often using a thread that did not match the colour or texture of the garment. It is also seen as a stitch for closing scars.’ A functional stitch, then, though you wouldn’t immediately know it looking at these works, with their sensuous, sumptuous surfaces. There’s a relationship to needlework techniques from elsewhere in the world – I’m thinking of kantha stitching, from Southeast Asia and also Swiss darning – and Maxim’s emphasis on the functional use of her technique ties her into a lineage of people fixing things, of mending and using and reusing. Dhunge mutunge is also a kind of tack, which is a stitch used in sewing and garment construction to temporarily baste or attach pieces of cloth together. Tacks are used to annotate fabric during construction, and to hold the vents and pockets of garments in place while they move from the factory to the shop floor: they correctly position things, make sure that nothing is sagging or sitting funny. A tack’s most important feature is its temporality. It is never permanent.
The ubiquity of textiles makes them a cipher for almost anything. Recent attempts to survey textile art – as in Unravel, as well as upcoming international touring exhibitions at the Hayward Gallery (Material World) and MoMA (Woven Histories, which just closed at LACMA) belie a desire to taxonomise and impose some sense of order on this quietly unruly discipline, which so often is forced to sit in that contentious place between ‘art’ and ‘craft’, and which, it should be noted, is increasingly used to survey practitioners who are in some way ‘non-normative’, whether in terms of geography, gender, race, class or orientation. But textiles are slippery, and collecting so many practices under such a wide and unruly umbrella can be flattening. Telling Moments is satisfying in its narrowness. It’s a small show, neatly done. Another part of textile practice is the idea of a swatch, wherein new techniques – especially for decorating a cloth’s surface – are tested, put under tension, tested again, and eventually extrapolated into clothing. Each of these six works seems to look at the same question from a slightly different angle, drawing a subtly different conclusion, and it’s rewarding to spend time with them and note the differences in the answers they come up with.
Installation View, Georgina Maxim, Telling Moments, 2024. Goodman Gallery, London.
At the Barbican, Maxim’s work was shown next to work by Harmony Hammond, José Leonilson and Louise Bourgeois examining textile works looking at wound and repair. There is Bourgeois’s oft-quoted observation of growing up around women mending and making clothing, which is worth reproducing here:
The needle is used to repair damage. It’s a claim to forgiveness. It is never aggressive, it’s not a pin.
Crucially, these stitches are temporary. You cannot fix that which is worn thin, not forever – things change. There’s a frustration in these new works by Maxim, a sense of fallibility. Medical stitches are meant to be removed. So are tacks. They are ways of fastening things together for now, not solutions for forever. If Bourgeois says the needle is a claim, there’s no guarantee that the claim will be successful. Maxim says her work is about recovering the people – women – who wore these clothes before they wore through. This recovery, too, has no assurance of success – but we should do it anyway, just as we should mend and re-mend our clothes and textiles as we wear them out. When I walked out of the gallery onto shiny pavement and into weak London sunshine I noticed a threadbare patch on my jeans. Must mend that soon, I thought, and then I walked away.
