1 - Charlie Barlow

Mong Kok 5000
●●●●●●■●●●●●
Parched Limbs
Blank Expression
Alone, Together
Ice Mopping
Bogland
Until
Grey
5 Ft 3
Phalanges
Blanket
Pestilence
Gargantua

5 Ft 3 2016
Building (powered via extension lead), lightbulb, skirting board, carpet, washing powder, cleaning equipment
Performance: 13.15 hours/week | Peterborough City Gallery | Photographer: Rosie Cooper

For the average mother's week of cleaning, Barlow constantly cleaned a constructed building - white on the outside, homely on the inside - with cleaning equipment including Hetty Hoover, sponges with water and a mop. Each day she added a bag of washing powder to the building to clean/unclean with; this had an overwhelming smell. From afar, bar the odd glimpse, her body was hidden by the walls, and close by, the audience could view her actions through paneless windows.

- The home as a place of safety yet a confining space of upkeep; cleaning as a meditative act and one of endless labour; expectations of living standards.

Alistair Gentry

Above the stifling near silence of an empty house being maintained with soft treads and gentle rearrangements, a noise or a non-noise amplified in its awfulness by the rarely less than dreadful aural and visual sterility of the white cube contemporary art gallery, Charlotte Barlow can occasionally be heard before she is seen, either through the thud and swish of a scrubbing pad on a wall or via the sound of a droning Hetty Hoover being horribly misused as a means of sucking up clumped washing powder that has ended up on the floor as a result of Barlow's very unclean acts of cleaning. Hetty, being a “she”, is of course pink and has eyelashes. “She” is yet another addition to the pantheon of pointlessly, normatively but bizarrely gendered products which become “for” female consumers merely by virtue of being pink, delicate and sparkly... or “for” men because they come in butch colourways like navy blue or matte black, or because they have rugged styling. Apparently Hetty was conceptualised as a wife to the well-known Henry, whose friendly male face sucks up dirt. Now Hetty's grinning, doe-eyed visage does the same, although the dodgy or even obscene semiotics of her carrying out this act apparently passed her makers by. Or maybe they didn't. Somehow Henry and Hetty have even produced a miniature vacuum cleaner offspring, although the logistics and imagery of the copulation, gestation and birth involved in such an event are mind boggling and unpleasant. A nearby blackboard asks “How does housework make you feel?” and invites responses, but Barlow's cubic cell within the monochrome blankness of the gallery itself already expresses eloquently the way many of us feel about housework. Knowing that the construction of this prison for the artist came about because of health, safety, conservation and cleanliness concerns about washing powder spreading unchecked through the whole gallery is conceptually perfect and ironically amusing– albeit not entirely intentionally– for Barlow's work and for the whole exhibition's theme of labour imposed upon uncomplaining and semi-invisible women. Perhaps uncomplainable is a better word than uncomplaining, even though it isn't officially a word, because housewives and servants are like artists in the sense that they're rarely consulted or listened to on the subject of their own workloads and capabilities. Washing powder all over the gallery is not OK, but an artist stuck in a box with the same washing powder for hours at a time, getting the rash-inducing, caustic material on her skin and her hair and in her clothes... “well, it's her job, isn't it?” is strongly implied as an attitude. Seen in this context, the messes Barlow makes in her acts of “cleaning up” could be seen as a clean(ish) counterpart to a genuine prisoner's dirty protest, undertaken for similarly defiant and exasperated reasons.

Charley Genever

an uncleanable speck

she always was
full of things
in her silent white house
a sweatshop
scour dilute repeat
she paints a mushroom
on the wall
in slow circles
scour dilute repeat
her hands porous
never dirtless
her feet blistered
sore and powdery
she smelt
of hidden secrets
a stuffed hoover bag
fluffed at arm’s length
an abandoned pillow
she was like
the mouth of quicksand
still surfaced
underneath
scour dilute repeat
thuds of walled wolves
she heard the
whisper
some would
look in
they only ever see the filth
they only ever see the filth
look in
some would
whisper
she heard the
thuds of walled wolves
scour dilute repeat
underneath
still surfaced
the mouth of quicksand
she was like
an abandoned pillow
fluffed at arm’s length
a stuffed hoover bag
of hidden secrets
she smelt
sore and powdery
her feet blistered
never dirtless
her hands porous
scour dilute repeat
in slow circles
on the wall
she paints a mushroom
scour dilute repeat
a sweatshop
in her silent white house
full of things
she always was
an uncleanable speck

Photographer: Rosie Cooper

Photographer: Jonny Dickens

Photographer: Rosie Cooper

Photographer: Jonny Dickens

Photographer: Rosie Cooper