Collaborative Projects

Lubaina Himid + Susan Walsh

Rub a Tub Senior – Invisible Wash

We make work about the invisible and the unrecorded.

Usually Susan thinks about people with transient lives, the objects they rescue carry

with them and treasure in a new place.

Lubaina over paints old objects with patterns, portraits and texts to make new

readings of established histories.

We have worked together making films about artists lives, old houses and museum

collections.

Between us we have explored behind the „scenes‟ at the V&A Museum, The Bowes

Museum, The Hatton, The Geffrye Museum, The Tate, Stoke Museum and Platt Hall,

so Artemis sounded like fun because we could take things away.

We were looking for large mahogany tables and fine walnut wardrobes but these

were probably the only things they didn‟t have. However we are fickle and fell in love

with Rub a Tub senior and Albion.

They that wash on Monday Have all the week to dry, They that wash on Tuesday Are not so

much awry. They that wash on Wednesday Are not so much to blame. They that wash on

Thursday Wash for very shame. They that wash on Friday Wash in sorry need. They that

wash on Saturday Are lazy sluts indeed. (1)

Wash Tubs

Servants

Slaves

Washboards

Betye Saar

Saar constructed two towers of washboards in 1998, Lest We Forget, The Strength

of Tears, Of Those Who Toiled and Lest We Forget, Upon Who‟s Shoulders We Now

Stand. Photocopies of vintage photographs of domestic workers - cooks,

laundresses, field-workers- are collaged to the undulating metal surfaces of the

washboards. The vertically stacked washboards form a timeline suggesting strength

and generational interdependence. At the top is an elegant period photograph of two

black women, one holding what appears to be a diploma, framed in a silver frame.

Just as the frame dramatically contrasts with the rustic quality of the washboards,

the photograph contrasts with the oppressive depiction of domestic drudgery. (2)

Monuments

Dollies

Cotton, Wool, Silk, Chiffon, Satin, Velvet,

Nylon, Rayon, Polyester, Denim.

Invisibility

Mangles

The soaps of the time had a tendency to turn whites yellow, and blue was a lump of

dye used to counteract this. It was tied in a piece of cloth and then mixed well

through the water before the clothes were added. If the laundress mixed carelessly

the clothes came out marked with yellow and white streaks. After the blue rinse, the

sheets and linens were wrung out for a third and final time, and hung up to dry.

Thus, the first - and simplest - load of laundry took one soaking, three washes, one

boiling and four rinses: eight different processes. (3)

Patterns - Stripes, Polka Dots, Flowers, Paisley, Zig Zags, Circles, Swirls, Diamonds,

Checks, Spots, Triangles, Squares, Droplets, Spirals, Ladders, Rope, Stars.

Brancusi - Endless Column

Unrecognised contributions

Invisible Wash

(1) The Victorian House - Judith Flanders

(2) Betye Saar - Jane H Carpenter

(3) The Victorian House - Judith Flanders

Domestic - belonging to home or family; enjoying or accustomed to being at home;

private; tame; not foreign; a servant in the home.

Tableau - a picture or vivid „pictorial‟ impression; a suddenly created dramatic or

impressive vivant; a moment or scene in which action is frozen for „dramatic‟ effect.

Chambers Dictionary

In 1999 Susan Walsh curated Domestic Tableau, participating artists were Mary

Fedden, Lubaina Himid, Julie Fu, Jill Morgan and Shani Rhys James. In the

catalogue she wrote:

“No longer do we have to express the drudgery, mundanity and unequal labour that

domesticity has often overwhelmed us with. We now, as we near the 21st century

can, if we choose, decide to celebrate our gains, both psychological and physical, in

this ongoing battle over space, its uses and our presence in it.

We already know about the struggles and claustrophobic effect women have had to

endure over centuries of domestic imprisonment but now we can transform

ourselves, our spaces, our language, our thinking, in order to change the meaning of

„domestic‟. The domestic picture can be one of luxury, grandeur, pleasure, support,

indulgence. It can be productive, creative and open.”

“Something hidden away might become something to be opened: something invisible

might become something to be touched: something entombed might be brought to

life. It is the relation to the past which creates the possibility of anticipation; the

present is merely a hinge between these worlds of memory and desire.”

Susan Stewart - An After As Before Deep Storage 1998

In 2004 in the catalogue for Naming The Money Lubaina Himid wrote:

“The strange thing is that now that the work is almost finished, its painted, it stands

up, is photographed, now that the one hundred texts are written and the music is

being added to them, now that one hundred people are really people whom I seem

to have invented, summoned, written into being and made real, I realise that this

work is much more about naming than it is about money. It is an attempt to get to

the bottom of the dilemma of losing your name, being relieved of your real identity,

being saddled with another more convenient or less embarrassing identity and how

you then have to invent something else equally real simply to survive, to make sense

of being alive.

It is the story of the slave/servant, but also of the leper, of the émigré, of the refugee,

of the asylum seeker.

If it is true and people are more real in who they are and therefore more important

when their name and family history is written down and they live in the same place

for generations, if this is really what makes you worth something then this is what I

have tried to do here in this piece with these people.

Each cut out has a name, a real name, each one is able to say who they really are

and what they used to do. Each one lives with their new name and their new

occupation attempting somehow to reconcile the two. Every one of the cut outs in

this installation is trying to tell you something, each has a voice that can be heard on

the sound track playing in the gallery space or read on an invoice attached to each

back.

I thought I was talking to a firm of accountant in order to help them get the books

straight, to get them to record the contribution, in figures, that we from somewhere

else make to this place, this wealth, but I was wrong to try to do this.

What happened was that gradually I realised that a hundred people were talking to

me as if I was a records clerk, telling me to write a sort of registry of names as proof

that they existed as individual named people with real lives and real identities. I did

as I was told.

Perhaps I am a records clerk employed by a firm of accountants.

Rub a Tub Senior was exhibited as part of Hunter Gatherers at Project Space Leeds curated

by Pippa Hale and Zoe Sawyer in 2011