Abigail Lane's work is cheeky, gory and spooky. Since finishing her training at Goldsmiths and showing in Damien Hirst's exhibition Freeze (1988), she has papered gallery walls with buttock prints {Bottom Wallpaper, 1992) and bloody marks [Bloody Wallpaper, 1995}. Bodily traces appear in photographs shown at her first solo exhibition Making History held at the Karsten Schubert Gallery, London in 1992. Lane is pictured wearing chopines (wooden over-shoes worn during medieval times to protect slippers from street grime), whose soles have been inked up to mark her steps. In the photographs she walks away, leaving marks where she has been.
The trail left by Lane should be an indexical sign, a direct trace or imprint deriving from contact. This type of sign was an important part of second-wave feminist art, used by Mary Kelly in Post-Partum Document (1973-9), as it offered a way to signify the body, without offering it up to the viewer's gaze. But Lane does not configure these signs as somehow more truthful. She subverts our expectations by replacing the print of the chopine, which we expect, with a foot print (the base of the chopine is formed into the shape of a bare foot, leaving a 'naturalistic' print, rather than an impression of the sole of a shoe). In common with a number of contemporary artists, Lane plays on Freud's theory of the 'unheimlich' (the nearest translation being uncanny or unhomely), the ability of the familiar, often the domestic, to be transformed into the unsettling and strange.
With Andy Warhol, Robert Gober and Virgil Marti, Lane's work was shown in the exhibition Apocalyptic Wallpaper, at the Wexner Center for the Arts, Ohio in 1997. Color photographs made in the same year picture people in rooms, the images made uncanny by stuffed wild animals lurking outside their windows and doors. Lane has also drawn on our fascination with detective, supernatural and horror stories. In the installation The Incident Room (1993) the head and arms of a waxwork woman, lit by lamps, emerge from a pile of earth like a corpse at a crime scene. Her solo show at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London in 1995 invited the visitor to unravel a fictional murder story. At her exhibition at the Victoria Miro Gallery, London, held in the autumn of 2001 Lane exhibited a set of painted film posters for her own unfinished film projects, and a garden shed. Peering inside, you saw a plume of smoke rising from a pair of shoes. It recalled the film The Wizard of Oz, a cozy reminder of childhood, but also summoned up horrifying photographs of the charred remains of bodies that supposedly spontaneously combusted. |
