Cottagecore
4.2 – 26.3.22
Galerie Sultana, Paris FR
with Jesse Darling, Edie Fake, Benoît Piéron, and Robin Plus
© Aurélien Mole
Sultana is pleased to present Cottagecore, an exhibition of paintings, sculpture, photography, and installation exploring the relationships, metaphors and imbrications between the body, identity, and the built environment.
The works gathered here are considered alongside an eponymous aesthetic trend that began proliferating on social media in the mid-2010s among teens and young adults. Cottagecore (cf. fairycore, farmcore, and #cottagevibes) is a romantic re-revivalism of a 19th century pastoral lifestyle centered upon the domestic; characterized by floral motifs, prairie dresses, baking, gardening, and engaging in vernacular crafts such as embroidery, knitting, pottery, or furniture building. Central themes also include self-sufficiency, caretaking, and performances of ample leisure time such as frolicking through bucolic fields or reading. While perhaps easily disregarded as toothless escapism (the trend has also been criticized for its glorification of colonialist aesthetics and a Eurocentric rural lifestyle upheld by forced servitude and racial and gendered oppression*), the emergence of cottagecore reflects the anxieties of a young generation faced with an increasingly precarious, regressive, and bleak society. Many of the trend’s adherents view cottagecore as anti-capitalist in its opposition to urban living and desire to return to a more autonomous and cyclical temporality. Particularly popular among LGBTQI+ youth, cottagecore celebrates reproductive labors of care and crafts historically dismissed as women’s work and reimagines a certain type of domesticity beyond traditional gender roles, heteronormative, and chrononormative** values. Similarly, the artists presented in Cottagecore conceptually and materially engage in what Canadian architect and theorist Olivier Vallerand terms “a queer view of spatial thinking”***, in the ways that they highlight the often-invisible normative structures that underlie the architectural organization of space and time. Incorporating materials and subjects drawn from the artists’ immediate surroundings, as well as crafts associated with feminist, domestic, and collective practices, the works juxtapose and subvert the gendered binaries of the public and private spheres.
Imagining the body as a building, Edie Fake’s metaphorical abstractions contrast the stasis of built structures with the fluidity of trans and non-binary identities. Referencing the Pattern & Decoration movement of the 1970s-80s, an art historical precursor to cottagecore which rebuked the ideological purity of male-dominated Minimalism and Conceptualism by embracing non-western or femininized forms of abstraction and craft, Fake’s speculative architectures eliminate the distinction between structure and ornament, appearing to be built from the very geometric shapes and patterns that embellish them. His fluorescent, diagrammatic compositions hover against velvety, cosmically black backgrounds. Inspired by the precarious ecological landscape of the Californian desert or the evolving facades of Chicago’s bygone bars, they explore the potentials of what “queer space” can mean.
As though responding to Fake’s trippy architectural metaphors for the self, Robin Plus’ My Pals (2021) depicts a towering, yet tenuous, assembly of colored pallets stacked upon each other, almost mocking the monolithic apartment buildings in the background. Plus’ training as a dancer before turning to photography is evidenced in his images by a particular sensitivity to the body in space, and the affirmative or alienating forces that the built environment may exert on it. A seemingly direct documentation of a familiar world is subtly made strange through its oneiric ambiguities of geography and time. The artist centers his friends and peers from the queer club scene, whom he endearingly refers to as “creatures of the night”, in broad natural light and vast, open-aired landscapes, overwriting the historical spatial relegation of queer culture to the margins and underground. In Cactus and Sunlight (both 2021) the body, while absent, is poetically evoked through structural features, alluding to the many immaterial desires and codes with which place is charged, and suggesting, perhaps, that our bodies inform the identity of a space just as much as the other way around.
Spanning sculpture, drawing, installation, and text, Jesse Darling’s practice broadly explores the precariousness of architectural, cultural, and corporeal bodies under failing hegemonies of knowledge and power. In We Tried (2019), the vulnerability of the human body is rendered in the very architectural materials against which it must contend. Two pairs of spindly legs made of forged rebar – steel rods typically used in the reinforcement of concrete – emerge from the wall in a seated position, anchored in blocky feet of wet clay. A nod to the English idiom “feet of clay”, which refers to a hidden weakness or flaw in a presumably powerful person, We Tried queries the equation of human value to productivity and function in a patriarchal, capitalist, and ableist society.
The act of bending, or queering, architectural elements is also present in the work of Benoît Piéron, whose “sacrificial practice of time” is marked by a life lived outside of it, due to a lifelong experience with illness and a childhood spent in hospital. His art consists of textile crafts, such as patchwork and lanyard, designing patterns and gardening, and is informed by the experience of waiting and meditations on inbetweeness. The body’s nebulous borders are most viscerally subverted in Rouge à levres (2019), a tube of lipstick made from the artist’s own blood, transforming the internal and invisible locus of the artist’s pathology into a superficial adornment. In Paravent (2022), the cheap vinyl panels of a medical ‘intimacy’ screen are retrofitted with hand sewn patchwork made from repurposed hospital sheets (which in some instances still bear traces of the bodies they once ensconced), fusing the clinical rigidity of hospital infrastructure with invocations of the sensual body. The sheets also take form as plush vampire bats, a spirit animal for Piéron. Psychopomps are mythological creatures that guide souls from the realm of the living to the dead, offering comfort along the way. Their little weighted bodied are meant to confer peace upon the patient who holds them, just as Piéron’s wallpaper designs further consider the calming, somatic effects of optical patterns and interior décor. Baldosas Inmaculadas (2012-2022) calls to mind the work of William Morris, the radical Victorian designer, architect, and figurehead of British Arts & Crafts, a social and art historical movement whose influence is most visible in cottagecore.
Arts & Crafts emerged in the late 19th century in response to the deleterious social and ecological effects of industrialization, championing the importance of skilled craftworkers and the applied arts and the role they played in the quality of one’s everyday life, in everyday spaces such as the home. The movement idealized medieval society, in the ways that men and women worked collectively in the home, during an era that turned the phenomenon of ‘separate spheres’ – the dichotomy of the domestic/private and public – into ideological doctrine of gender and class subordination.
Cottagecore’s popularity peaked in 2020 with the onset of the pandemic, as we were suddenly circumscribed to the immediate surroundings of our homes. Global lockdowns collapsed the spatial distinction between the public and private spheres, and temporarily eliminated the dialectical concept of center and margin vis-à-vis remote working and the de-centralization of professional opportunity from competitive and expensive urban areas. Confinement not only brought renewed attention to the ways our most immediate environments – our personal, intimate space – shape us, but triggered the mass realization that everything from where we live and how we work, to the ways we structure our time, not only disserve most people, but are also patently constructed. Cottagecore, by contrast, suggests a space of radical potential in which kinship, labor, and time can be rethought and enacted differently.
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*The aesthetic is also popular among far-right online ‘communities’, such as Tradwives, ostensibly for these very reasons.
**Elizabeth Freeman defines the concept of chrononormativity as the use of time to organize individual human bodies toward maximum productivity. Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories (Duke University Press,2010).
***Olivier Vallerand, “Regards queer sur l’architecture : une remise en question des approaches identitaires de l’espace”, Captures Volume 1 Numéro 1, May 2016. http://www.revuecaptures.org/node/349/?utm_medium=website&utm_source=archdaily.com