Unbecoming: Kelly Limerick

 Artist Kelly Limerick is well-known for her large-scale soft sculpture installations and collaborations with global brands the likes of Disney and Gucci. She is also no stranger to the contemporary art scene through her projects with Esplanade – Theatres on the Bay and OH! Open House. Yet, Unbecoming at Cuturi Gallery marks the first time that she is putting out a corpus of new personal work, and given the opportunity to speak for herself. This inaugural solo presentation witnesses her destruction of her painstakingly crocheted artworks, to make a point about the value of labour in craft, and the crises of our contemporary times.

With the click of a button, the artist fires up her blowtorch and points it at her crocheted vessel. Its touch is almost imperceptible, and the flame nearly colourless – but its constant low roar portents its irreversible impact. 

The surrounding air quivers and the vessel begins to gently smoke. Stitch by stitch the crocheted yarn glisten, pucker up and then blacken. Eventually embers spring up that burn more furiously.

A gaping hole emerges in the vessel and parts of it collapse. Once upright and pristine, held together by the structural integrity of thousands of tightly crocheted stitches, now pools of its melted flesh rapidly solidify into a craggy, battle-worn surface. 

Is this death, or rebirth? After all, the dissolution of the vessel that was once more recognisable as craft object simultaneously gives way to a misshapen form that begins to identify more as sculptural art through its ruptured deformity and textural ambivalence.

Either way, neither the vessel pre- nor post- burning would have fulfilled its presumed intended function. Before, the porous crocheted object would never have held water despite taking on the form of a vase. And now, well, the nylon yarn may have hardened in places, but their various deformities create new openings that undermine their function.

Invoking a subversive majesty through the ritual of destruction  

“Pots do not cease to be pots when function is subverted,” says art critic Garth Clark in his 1992 essay ‘Subversive Majesty: Peter Voulkos’ Rocking Pot’, “Indeed, for millennia, denying function has been one of humankind’s ways of setting aside certain vessels of a different role, one that perforce became ritualistic and contemplative.”

In the case of Limerick’s Unbecoming series, her chosen ritual is that of destruction, and the contemplation that she invites viewers to is that of how value is unevenly accorded in the realm of art and craft.

This series has its roots in her previous body of work, Time is a Commodity (2021), where Limerick first set her works on fire following a challenging period of time. As a crochet artist, she felt intensely out of place in the local art scene, which seemed not to appreciate fibre arts the same way that other countries with more established industries of applied arts and design did.

Frustrated, she asked herself whether her work was worth anything in absence of an appreciative audience. “I wanted to know: if I destroyed my artwork, does it then become more worthless than it currently is, in other people’s eyes? Is there a value that’s lower than zero?” she wondered .

One need not face Limerick’s exact dilemma to relate to this, as the anxiety and frustration of trying to navigate unfamiliar power structures and gatekeeping certainly extends beyond the world of art. Limerick taps into these raw and unwieldy emotions, unleashing them upon her work.

In his essay on Voulkos’ Rocking Pot, Clark goes on to note, “Action was more important than judgement, and it is partly out of this sense of liberation from all expectations, not just those of traditional pottery, that gives this object its subversive majesty.”

Similarly, Limerick regains a sense of her own power and control in that first impulsive act of destruction. It has since created a bold momentum in her practice, in which she finds her own liberation – and her own subversive majesty.

Reflecting the discordant truth of living life

“Art is art when what is made unmakes itself in the making and realizes, in barely recognizable form, the discordant truth of living life,” writes artist Paul Chan in his 2010 essay ‘A Time Apart’. The paradoxical idea that Chan presents here resonates strongly with Limerick’s works in how they reflect the various crises of our time.

While the genesis of Unbecoming may be traced to Limerick’s personal creative tribulations, it speaks clearly to the broader, frankly horrifying experience of living in these contemporary times. Under the siege of fire and smoke, I see in these melting figures the fate of the human race, fighting a losing battle against the unholy configuration of crises that plague us today: the global climate disaster, a longstanding pandemic, crippling capitalist inequalities, a looming third world war– you name it. 

In this manner Limerick’s works find comradeship with that of other artists who have enacted violence or destruction as a means of commenting on human nature. Famed (or rather, infamous) Chinese artist Ai Weiwei’s Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn (1995) witnesses him shattering a priceless artefact from a bygone civilisation to critique the policies of Communist China.

Meanwhile, other artists take to digital methods of destruction. In his series New Order, London-based artist Gordon Cheung uses algorithms to automate the disintegration of images of tulips. Here he references the artificial hyper-inflation of value in 17^th century Holland’s tulip mania to comment on the absurdities of capitalism.

Towards a rich interiority and intentionality

As her first solo exhibition, Unbecoming marks a significant milestone in Limerick’s artistic practice. She forsakes the more extravagant and showier presentations that tend to come with the territory of the brand partnerships that she is usually known for, and instead goes inward to excavate the quieter corners of her emotional reality.

Each gesture that emerges is layered with intentionality. She chooses vessels as the primary symbol of this series of work, invoking that early archetypal symbol of human civilisation: the humble pot. Limerick subverts this eminently recognisable form in multiple ways. While her works take on the form of functional objects, they are created from material that renders them useless.

Crocheted pots challenge the category of fine art double-fold, since crochet and ceramics are both craft forms that have historically faced a crisis of categorisation in the fine art world (a crisis which, arguably, endures to this day). 

Our interaction with the works is also made deliberately uncomfortable and awkward – each work is placed at lower than eye-level, and we are invited to set foot on an intricately crocheted carpet. In a domestic setting, this is perhaps natural. After all, crochet is a soft, warm material, inviting to the touch, at home at home.

But what happens here in the gallery, when it bumps up against white-cube conventions where work demands not to be touched, and placed on a pedestal? The tension mounts during Please Cross Beyond this Line (2022), a participatory performance in which the artist is present in the room and working on the very item that we inadvertently disrespect with our footsteps.

Crochet as process unfolding in time

Whether through disrespect or defacement, the interactions between the artist, the audience and the work are a key aspect of the works in Unbecoming. In this regard, Limerick’s focus on process here marks a departure in the way she approaches a craft that she has spent more than two decades of her life working with.

One might say that her breakthrough piece was Brother (2021), a provocative piece in which she critiques Singapore’s treatment of migrant workers by unravelling a large-scale knitted quilt on which she had painted the word, “Brother”. Her act of destruction here alludes to how migrant workers’ identities are erased despite the way their labour is woven into the very fabric of our society. Given the significance of this gesture, the strength of the work fundamentally pivots on that moment of unravelling.

Likewise, Unbecoming unfolds in time. As it does so, one cannot help but think of the countless hours of making that are wasted when they go up in smoke, leaving viewers with a sense of mottainai, or feeling of regret over waste.  

Ultimately, the only works in Unbecoming that escape defacement are the series of photographs on fabric that greet the viewer in the main gallery. These works depict the original five vessels in an almost ethereal fashion, their lightly fluttering veils memorialising what had once been. I look at these pale shadows and think about what the world might look like when civilisation as we know it is done wreaking havoc upon ourselves: how will we be remembered, and by whom?

I speak of Limerick’s works, as well as our own time here on this earth, when I quote this admittedly somewhat didactic segment in Paul Chan’s ‘A Time Apart’:

“Being mortal means the end is ever near. Realising this charges every moment with promise and significance. And it makes what matters less dependent on the power of fate, and more on the inner imperative to find a shape of one’s own, before it is too late.”

For Limerick, she has found a shape of her own in shapelessness, and forged her journey of becoming, ironically, in unbecoming.    

Text by Michelle JN Lim 

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