\u201cLondon is grey and cold. Night falls early. 4 o\u2019clock is lighting time and sometimes much earlier.\u201d The words scroll down the right-hand side of the screen, to their left, a series of images\u200a\u2014\u200aagainst a cloud-dappled blue sky, a hand extends from a 90-degree angle white-shirted arm to grasp a rope; segments of coat-clad bodies in black and white, hands thrust deep into pockets, and over them a dense, hand-scrawled script in faint blue. \u201cCount your blessings\u200a\u2014\u200ayou have children, mother, brother, family, friends near you.\u201d This is Ingrid Pollard\u2019s Belonging in Britain<\/em>, a film about her family\u2019s emigration from Guyana in the 1950s, presented alongside hand-tinted photographs of the artist\u2019s mother at home: in her garden, kitchen, sitting room, looking through a family album, proffering freshly baked buns.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The word domestic <\/em>comes from the Latin domesticus<\/em>, \u201cbelonging to the household,\u201d from domus<\/em>, \u201chouse.\u201d It also refers to the person who carries out the menial tasks of the home; a tame animal; a violent quarrel between family members; and goods or affairs that occur within a demarcated territory\u200a\u2014\u200ainternally. 56 Artillery Lane<\/em> (sited within its titular address, a set of Huguenot houses elegantly restored into a gallery space) hosts an array of works that traverse\u200a\u2014\u200ain form, content, and ethos\u200a\u2014\u200aintersections of art-making and dimensions of the domestic. Indeed, particularly for female artists, how the two are intrinsically linked, sites of contradiction both frustrating and fruitful, is perhaps best understood through processes of re-vision, re-membering, and re-imagining.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Curated by Amy Budd and Naomi Pearce, the group exhibition contains a diverse selection of works, from Stanley Spencer\u2019s Choosing a Petticoat<\/em> (1936), which depicts an argument between the artist and his first wife, the painter Hilda Carline, to a commissioned film by Jenna Bliss, Poison the Cure<\/em> (2017), which incisively portrays, through fractured speculative narrative encounters, the role of the American state in the global trade of drugs and pharmaceuticals. Lucy Orta\u2019s Refugee Wear<\/em> (1992\u201398), a series of clothes fashioned from tents and sleeping bags, is uncannily prescient given the ever-swelling population of the homeless and displaced, both globally and on the streets of London; while Anicka Yi\u2019s Deep State<\/em> (2017) evokes a more tongue-in-cheek sense of organic place\u200a\u2014\u200asuspended lightboxes containing photographs of cultured bacteria from the offices of the gallery.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At the physical and perhaps notional heart of the show are reconstructions (perhaps re-edits?) of two seminal London feminist exhibitions of the 1970s: Fenix\u00b0<\/em> (Su Richardson, Monica Ross, and Kate Walker, 1977) and A Woman\u2019s Place<\/em> (1974), South London Art Group\u2019s large-scale domestic installation at 14 Radnor Terrace, Lambeth, which offered a critique of domestic life and the creative spaces available to women artists at the time. These are described in further detail in the exhibition\u2019s impressive accompanying publication, which sensitively tenders the \u201cfeminist curatorial strategy\u201d employed by Budd and Pearce as one that privileges collaboration, discourse, and inclusive, non-hierarchical approaches. In keeping with this ethos, the gallery hosts an ambitious run of workshops, performances, events, and panel discussions that consider the potential for both art and domestic spaces to be animated, open, and in flux.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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