Sheila Gaffney’s feminist awakening happened while she was a student at Camberwell. In one sense, it was the most stimulating period of her life, an opportunity to spend hours in the studio absorbing knowledge from tutors who were masters of their craft, while also picking up habits and skills that would go on to shape her entire practice. But alongside this creative fulfilment came the realisation that sculpture existed in a deeply dogmatic sphere, with a canon and pedagogy almost entirely dominated by male voices. She would need to break away if she wanted to find her own.
In the exhibition Embodied Dreaming, currently showing at the Blenheim Walk Gallery at Leeds Arts University, Gaffney returns to those questions preoccupying her as a student in the 1970s and 80s. How it feels to exist in a female body, how raw materials can encompass lived realities, how remembering can help remodel the self. As a result, she’s often puzzled to hear her works being labelled as ‘fresh’ or ‘current’. Meeting on Zoom with Gaffney alongside curator Marianna Tsionki to discuss the show, she explains that she never saw her work as having a particular timespan. ‘People keep using that word, fresh, and I’m just thinking, well when did it get out of date? I’ve never really upheld the notion that the last piece is the best piece. It’s all been one project that I’ve been thinking through in different ways at different times.’
Making is an ongoing process then, and one which demands as much from the psyche as from the fingers and thumbs. This exhibition sets out to show how imagination can play a huge part in forming our identities. Her phrase ‘embodied dreaming’ is borrowed from the psychoanalyst Christopher Bollas, who used it to describe the inner worlds children create while playing, before they can find the language to explain why. This liminal space between thinking and being drives Gaffney’s creative purpose, prompting her to question how our early selves shape the people we become, and how such ideas can be authentically expressed through sculpture.
For Gaffney, one starting point is old family photographs, her source material for many of the works on display here. Lingering childhood memories and holidays in Ireland are referenced by the six bronze sculptures positioned throughout the space, as well as in framed prints of isolated snippets from the family album. But the artist isn’t looking for a flat reproduction of a bygone event; it’s the sharply observed details that count, the crisp pleat of a skirt, a bony knee beneath chiffon, a wrist clasped snugly in an embroidered sleeve. She is recreating essences and textures in a way that feels carefully measured, and usually is. Memory can be flimsy and unreliable, but Gaffney’s approach is a methodical, organised inquiry and a process which doesn’t necessarily have an end point. ‘I think finding the voice has been my life’s work,’ she observes.
Less concerned with family folklore than with traces of sensory memory, she nevertheless has become some kind of custodian of the Gaffney archive, homing in on period details her own Irish parents might have found unremarkable. While the use of family photographs acts as a tool for cataloguing her personal lived experience, they also capture the fleeting, fragmentary way we embrace – or resist – memory. Her parents might have appeared pragmatic and unsentimental about the country they had left behind, but its absence was felt in their London home and in a certain nagging sense of outsiderhood Gaffney experienced growing up. We trade tales of Irish mothers and grandmothers snipping their faces neatly out of photographs, a form of female erasure that intersects with some of the themes Gaffney has spent her career examining.
Talking with Gaffney makes textures from my own childhood Irish holidays crowd back into my head. Razor shells, wheaten bread, the Quality Street wrappers we definitely shouldn’t have been hurling into an open fire. Distilling amorphous memories into neat visual swatches is strangely comforting. Yet many of the artist’s photographs had to be salvaged from the family home before her mother could bin them, seemingly unsettled by the past’s constant intrusion. For Gaffney, however, solidifying the past into clay, wax, bronze or giclée helps her start making sense of it all. She symbolically threads little details into the work that imbue universal concepts with a sense of the personal. The sculpture ‘All at See’ (2018) shows a small girl adrift, immersed in the sea between Ireland and England, with Gaffney’s own precious rings standing in for beach floats. Meanwhile ‘St Lucy’ and ‘Dressing Table Vanitas’ (both 2018) feature ambiguous forms that suggest femininity, respectively the soft swell of a breast and the hard edges of an earring. These are poised on hand mirrors, a nod to the dressing table as a kind of studio, where a person can remould herself before stepping back into the outside world.
Gaffney often uses jewellery and clothing as identity markers. Perhaps it’s these which drive home the passage of time most effectively. It feels uncanny to rest your gaze on an empty garment, or to see a hemline granted more visibility than a smile – works like ‘Vest’ (2005) and ‘Skirt’ (2021) feel notable for the bodies that aren’t in them. Gaffney’s choice of materials plays into that sense of obsolescence, particularly when she replaces the comfortable properties of cotton with brittle textures like paper. However, there are no hard and fast rules. ‘I don’t think I have any technique,’ she says. ‘I’m just very interested in using whatever processes I know to make things that feel quite real in the world. I’m modelling, I’m making, and I’m drawing beyond just an idea. I am trying to use materials to make it feel real for the person looking at it.’
Part of this involves constructing a female form that feels true and subjective, not pandering to the male gaze or flaunting the brilliance of its maker. Her piece ‘Mum said you should always brush your hair’ (2015) is a rebuke to the idea that sculpture should be vast or imposing. It is instead formed of a small bronze female figure perched on a table, which in turn balances on a life-sized hand mirror, underneath which is a vaguely architectural-looking cardboard structure. The girl’s posture is loose, understated, her face inscrutable. It invites curiosity rather than demanding your attention. In pieces such as this, Gaffney reassesses scale, suggesting that the impact of a work isn’t decided by the amount of space it takes up. She has previously likened some of her pieces to the kind of objects you might find on an Irish family mantelpiece, quietly communicating a private social currency which is just as deeply inscribed with meaning as any overblown monument.
In most of the works, Gaffney’s command over her material is striking. However, in the ‘Lightboxes’ sequence (2009), she takes a slightly different tack. These are nine photographic close-ups of costumes selected during a residency at Cliffe Castle in Keighley, the former home of a rich Victorian textile manufacturer. Working with museum artefacts must have been trying for a sculptor – after all, Gaffney was denied her usual freedom to physically bend the materials to her will. Instead, she placed the fabrics against a scanner, digitally transforming their soft folds into jewel-hard, flattened surfaces. Presented in lightboxes, they convey flamboyant echoes of the people who once wore them, while remaining closed off and inaccessible to us. Piercing rays from the scanning process peep through like flames, hinting at the objects’ impermanence and tying in with the exhibition’s overall note of ephemerality.
For Marianna Tsionki, who curated Embodied Dreaming, collaborating with Gaffney called for a highly intuitive, open-ended approach, in which floor plans could not be drawn up months in advance, or dimensions blithely handed over to technicians to figure out the particulars. Instead, their progress rested on a mutual trust: an ongoing, often wordless game of chess which saw both Gaffney and Tsionki manoeuvring pieces around the space until they just felt right. Both based at Leeds Art University, they could devote weeks rather than hours to installing the exhibition, to exploring various modes of display.
As a result, Tsionki’s store cupboard soon filled up with unplaced sculptures and small works in progress whose fate hadn’t yet been decided. It was an element of the artist she felt should be captured in the installation, which resulted in ‘Archive of ‘thinking through making” (2024). It’s a simple shelving unit packed with fragments of Gaffney’s sculpture and books, representing the kind of internal experimentation we don’t often witness at such close range. The items inside are like ingredients for a meal which may or may not be prepared, research materials to test out ideas and textures – artistic experimentation laid bare. ‘I’m interested in the small details of life, like the buttons on our clothes and very intimate things, and making replicas of them or casting them into another material to really amplify the detail,’ Gaffney explains.
That intimacy and care is still very much in evidence, but these specimens are less defined than the other works. They come to you in snatches or suggestions: a skein, a stem, a ridge, a fold, a bow. Idealised versions of familiar objects, but also raw and coursing with the potential of the studio. ‘Many people believe that when you present the behind-the-scenes processes, it is a demystification of the art itself. But I believe quite the opposite,’ Tsionki reflects. ‘I think it has created a certain magic within the exhibition, of different materials and different forms and their interaction with real objects and photographs.’
Then there are the works which showcase her versatility, such as the early sketch ‘Life room study 1979’, whose straight vertical lines inexplicably render the softness of a human body, and the mixed media piece ‘I saw what you did…’ (2005), a large cage containing a projector which beams hazy home videos into an iridescent wax husk. It is unusual among the works in boldly taking up space, while elsewhere in the room framed works are huddled intimately together, shunning chronology or even labels. Meanwhile, the tall, graceful tables displaying some of the smaller sculptures give the space an orderly, parlour-like air, as though in anticipation of unannounced guests, or students drifting between lectures.
It is fitting that this body of work is being shown on campus. Gaffney, now a Professor of Research herself, looks back fondly on her Camberwell mentors whose mood-swings, whims and eccentricities could create a frustrating but colourful backdrop for learning. She absorbed some of their tacit knowledge just from sculpting alongside them, even if she couldn’t articulate it fully at the time. In a modern university landscape, that kind of close-knit, encroachingly personal approach isn’t common, and the sharing of knowledge has to be instigated in different ways. Embodied Dreaming addresses this by communicating some of the insights gleaned over decades of work, documenting one artist’s efforts to unpack the singularity of her own experience.
‘Embodied Dreaming is very particular all the way through, in different ways, whether it’s the sense of a vest or being comfortable in a pair of tights or thinking about what it’s like to have sunlight on my arms when I’m small,’ Gaffney says. ‘And it’s the same subject revisited differently, but each work concludes – it just concludes. I wouldn’t say any of them are finished.’ By leaving her work this breathing room, she opens it up to possibility – whether to return to herself at a later stage, or simply to pass on small, perfectly-formed epiphanies to a new generation of sculptors and makers.
Orla Foster is a writer based in Sheffield.
Sheila Gaffney: Embodied Dreaming is on at Blenheim Walk Gallery, Leeds Arts University, from 4 October 2024 – 11 January 2025.
This review is supported by Leeds Arts University.
Published 20.11.2024 by Benjamin Barra in Reviews
2,030 words
