Susan Andrews Grace is among the women claiming this space, claiming Her space; and insisting upon it in a world that is not particularly accommodating to the square footage of the feminine. Unlike certain of Hesse’s work, that of Andrews Grace is not made with resinous materials that operate around volatile chemical reactions (much like the body), but instead, she chooses plaster, clay, house paint, fabrics, discards, empty containers; chooses white; chooses the inert (or the semblance of); chooses things that unravel and fray. As such, while perhaps Hesse spoke of a resilience that would move inevitably towards deterioration, Andrews Grace talks about the innate precarity that exists within objects and arrangements superficially described as stable.

Take for example, “Kitchen Table with Pantry Ghosts,” (2020) a white slender-legged wooden table set for an untraditional feast that will never be attended. On it, cast plaster food containers are aligned on narrow burlap narrow belts, which seem to resist or reject their otherwise desired role as aesthetic runners or functional place mats. Some of the vessels hold pale strands of kibiso, which is the protective outer surface of silk cocoons — a discard of the silk industry, considered too tough to loom. The inclusion of these thick wispy threads, too rigid to arc, but too organic to remain at absolute attention adds animation to this still life, and is indicative of Andrews Grace’s respect for her materials and their histories, and her manner of elevating leftover to centrepiece. One swipe of the hand, one uplift of a corner and the whole assemblage topples, and its constituents fracture and scatter — that thing that was once there, once so carefully arranged, whole, revered, and visited, now gone. This too is one image of domestic space. 

Another exercise in precarity is the shelves holding some 56 various plaster- cast or coated objects. Here again is another domestic surface or platform — horizontal structures that store and display, serving both aesthetic and functional purposes. Both the shelves and the objects held on them are described by way of corporeal gestures, which in their repetition become ritualistic, fetishistic — the reach up and towards marked by desire, the placement or retrieval performed with a care tempered by the haste of the moment. Such shelves become trophy cases of commodities which in maternal hands become the means by which so many human and nonhuman desires will come to be fulfilled. At intervals items tenuously dangle off or overhang the edge: a translucent line strung with white buttons hangs vulnerable to air currents and snags, while casts of paper towel rolls, now empty, jut out from the order of other things, whose uses presumably have not been exhausted.

I now momentarily return to Hesse, so as to mark Andrews Grace’s departure from her. Hesse was described to have had a relationship with her materials so intimate that she became them, and while Andrews Grace certainly knows her stuff, she seems to equally honour the division between herself and them. This space activates what Jane Bennett calls “‘thing-power’: the curious ability of inanimate things to animate, to act, to produce effects, dramatic or subtle.” (2) Referencing Merleau-Ponty she explains how “our gaze prompted by the experience of our own body, will discover in all other ‘objects’ the miracle of expression.” (3)

The gaze of Andrews Grace seems to enliven this miracle in acknowledging a hyper-potentiality of objects to become things, just as she identifies how the transformation of the domestic to the festishtic can be generated by bodily insistence and its repetitious articulations. “Look,” she says, how pistols and cigars become so easily phallic, or how they are phallic and become so easily anatomical, and how quickly it is they find their brethren and align in unison, in the archaic phalanx, which is the classic war formation of the Ancients — an arrangement that depends as much on space as the bodies that fill it.

The attunement to space in Domestic Fetishes, between the artist, the making and the made, allows for some self-realization (if I may) on the part of the objects; a dynamism whose manifestation is made possible by some private reassembling of its own minute properties. This division that Andrews Graces insists upon between herself and her materials permits the transformation of objects to things, the latter described by Bennett as, “vivid entities, not entirely reduced to the contexts in which human subjects set them, never entirely exhausted of their semiotics,” (4) which I think is the subtle underwriting to the entire show. The honouring of space, which is amplified by the artist’s devotion to white, a “fetish” which she justifies almost apologetically (which she needn’t) derives from another source of influence, which is that of the venerable Japanese designer Kenya Hara, whose theory of design shares affinities with Bennett. 

For Hara the purpose of design is “what is behind the thing,” it is, “to search for an essential quality in things.” In her privileging of orientation to the objects (now made things) over their physicality, Susan Andrews Grace seems to suggest that design is not only what is behind the thing, but what is in front of, and next to it. “White,” is a concept of extended mediation for Hara, who thinks of it not as a colour on the spectrum, but in terms of our perception and sensitivity to it; for him “white” lies next to “emptiness.” 

Domestic Fetishes, for all its presence and pattern, does offer a generous emptiness too. In the space between works; in the permission to approach or retreat; in the invitation to look again; in the shadows that play on the wall; the way the delicate veil obscures the smoothness of the wall on which it hangs; and the effect of the light that dramatically expands from within the caged wedding dress of “ Femina Domestica” (2020): all things diaphanous, things opaque; things there and things not. This becomes a kind of formula repeated throughout the collection, which describes not only the logic of the domestic, but speaks as well to those bodies that claim that “curious” space between biology and abstraction (which is home; life). Those bodies that fill it with something other than emptiness; who expand it with presence, pushed here, towards potentiality. 

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(2) Bennett, Jane. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things,6.
(3) Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology of Perception,197. 
(4) Bennett, 5.