Sarah Whipple
Ten in One Gallery, San Francisco, USA
What is perhaps most intriguing about Sarah Whipple’s work is her lack of interest in distinguishing it from anything that it resembles. At first glance, her wall sculptures and soft sculptures are so familiar as to seem rote; reminiscent of everything from paramecia to the Yellow Submarine, including a whole range of artists from Richard Lindner and Judy Chicago to Jim Isermann and Pae White. But while Whipple’s work shares concerns with many current artists and designers, it doesn’t share enough with any one of them to be seen as an affiliation or commentary. Rather, Whipple’s work coexists - a simple addition to the current obsession/nostalgia for all things soft and pendulous.
All of Whipple’s work in this show references fluids, puddles and lumps. Cut from richly coloured felt, moiré satin and polyester jacquard, the forms of Splat (egg), Splat (tomato), and Nirvana (all 1994) were not determined by Whipple so much as derived from natural states of expansion and rest. Every stitch of Whipple’s meticulously sewn seams evidence her debt to natural laws, exaggerating and signifying each form’s tenuous, amorphous edge. These boundaries, like skin or appendages, are made even more graphic when Whipple places them on the wall, contradicting the direction of gravity to emphasise their rippling, optical surfaces. Thus, a simple formal balance is struck; forms inspired by natural forces are constructed and displayed in such a way that their source is neutralised by their artifice.
If Whipple is motivated by an interest in the agreeability of liquids - their ability to adopt the form of their container - then she focuses conceptually on how fluids behave when they lack such limits and expand to the point of exhaustion. Milk spreading across formica, oil morphing in a lava lamp, blood pooling on asphalt; all are mesmerising phenomena, events whose ambience is intensified by liquids that have a certain viscosity. Even though physicists (or Jackson Pollock) could tell us that there are entirely calculable reasons for the shapes liquids make when spilled from a certain height at a certain velocity onto a certain surface, the pleasure of Whipple’s work is that you don’t have to care about any of that stuff. Nor does it seem to matter whether you care about eggs, tomatoes, cum or water. In fact, you’re excused from knowing (or even having to learn) anything beyond what you already recognise in the work. If this licence allows us to enjoy the sculptures unencumbered by the responsibility of being ‘viewers’, then it also accounts for Whipple’s lack of statement of purpose, at least beyond the unintrusive activity of choosing fabrics and sewing them into vaguely familiar forms. The fact that such broad familiarity is even possible, let alone enough to constitute an exhibition, is impressive in itself.
By being so agreeable, Whipple seems to ask what makes such indefinite shapes and such wilful uncertainty so prevalent now. More ambitiously, her work suggests that our current social and psychological malaise might be innately symbolised by the forms and traits of liquids. This is an association and an attraction that she doesn’t seem fully aware of, or doesn’t care about; a lack of rigour that is disappointing but consistent with her work. In any case, Whipple certainly can’t be accused of hyperbole. Sometimes a lack of rigour can be a welcome respite; something from which to gain a little pleasure and self-assurance.
Joe Scanlan
