24.04.25 – 05.05.25, #176 Gabrielle Barbé, ON NEW GROUND

“It could float, of course,

but would rather

plumb rough matter.

Airy and shapeless thing,

it needs

the metaphor of the body,”

• Poem, Mary Oliver, ‘Dream Work’ (1986)

A child hides under a sheet to play the ghost; a chair sits beneath a dust cover to protect it from paint. Their uncertain shapes are understood based on previous encounters. Concealing becomes part of the process of knowing, understanding the component parts of recognition — vague form, rough size, surrounding areas. Taken away from their usual environments Gabrielle Barbé’s hidden forms in On New Ground are twice-removed — from context, and from view. Edges, corners, and curves wrapped in fabric signal to a varied, semi-recognisable beneath. And then again, they are thrice removed. Working with the already-discarded objects of kerbsides and street corners, one stage of transition has occurred by the time Barbé intervenes. After moving from inside to outside, miscellaneous effects are pilfered, brought back indoors, repurposed and wrapped. Boundaries between public and private are blurred, with interior objects taking on new exteriorised meaning, only to be replaced again inside.

Amongst this unknowing is a certainty of these objects’ substance, giving density to the airiness of their textile wrappings. As Mary Oliver muses of the human spirit in her 1986 Poem — “it could float of course,/ but would rather/ plumb rough matter”. Barbé’s woven fabrics suggest similarly that they could be drifting away if untethered, but have come to rest stretched around a series of weighty forms. Without them they would collapse — airy, shapeless. Reminiscent in their own way of bandaged body parts, the works in On New Ground also recall the multiple ways in which fabric finds solidity. They speak to shapes wrapped around shoulders and feet; cast out on shop awnings, and tent poles; pleated over windows and spread around furniture. These appearances easily start to mimic each other — a covered chair looking rather like a seated figure, a curtain rail like the waist of a skirt. Barbé’s “metaphor of the body” is not just the suggestion of human bodies, but interior and structural ones too. Buildings and their rooms are their own types of skeletons. On New Ground bounces from the indoors to the outdoors, the interior to the architectural, intimacy to publicness. Under cover, hidden forms offer ways of gesturing to these in-betweens — a morse coded attempt at making sense of one another.

• Jean Watt

Gabrielle Barbé voltooit momenteel haar master in textielontwerp aan KASK & Conservatorium. Jean Watt studeert aan het postgraduaat curatorial studies.