Things Seen and Unseen

The worlds of art, craft and crime collide in a new exhibition from textile artist Shelly Goldsmith and photographer Sarah Pickering. Emma Love investigates…

Who would have thought that crafts and crime had anything in common? Well, textile artist Shelly Goldsmith for one – she’s been looking for many years at the idea of revealing narratives in clothes, her methods similar to those of forensic scientists. And photographer Sarah Pickering makes two: her documentary-style images of staged scenarios and explosions are set up and captured at police and fire service training centres. This month the work of both will come together, in Revealing Evidence, at the PM Gallery & House in Ealing, an exhibition they hope will generate an interesting dialogue. ‘We’re a perfect match because our thought processes are really similar – we both keep talking about latent matter and hidden narratives – yet the outcomes are incredibly different,’ says Goldsmith over coffee at her Ramsgate studio.

The exhibition should be fascinating. For Goldsmith, the scientific comparisons started in earnest when she had the rare opportunity of a day spent with biologist Alison Fendley, a senior scientist at the Forensic Science Service in Huntingdon. ‘It was very funny, because Alison was doing the same in her laboratory as I was in my studio. Her work is for real, but our methodologies were similar: she stains things to show up different body fluids, and I’d been using dyes to show staining too,’ recalls Goldsmith. ‘She asked if I’d like to see her pattern book, but her pattern book is just blood splats. Oh, that’s a repeat pattern! It makes you chuckle.’

Goldsmith uses reclaimed garments – the deliberately not-pretty, granny-style garments that come from second-hand shops or eBay or are given to her. Her work roughly divides into various craft techniques: there are lasers that draw with fire, so that the garment looks to have been seared; there’s sublimation printing (in which heat and pressure turn solid dye into vapour) and stitching. After the Flood It Got Very Hot is a polyester dress cut up so you can see its inside, and lasered so that the polyester melts to plastic, creating lines that reveal an image of a room in which a flood has turned everything upside down. ‘I’m finding a way to reveal latent matter that’s already imbued in the cloth, just as Alison does. She knows the information is in that cloth, and has to find a way to reveal what the garment has been through. That’s what I’m doing, but in a more artistic way.’

While Goldsmith uses parallels with science to delve into our psychological selves, and see how those hidden feelings that we all keep secret may have been imprinted or rubbed off on the inside of our clothes, Pickering’s deadpan pictures function almost as evidence themselves. With their latent sense of violence, they offer the viewer tell-tale signs of events that just happened, or are about to. ‘I find scientific photography fascinating, the way that it shows aspects of worlds that weren’t previously visible to us. There was a lot of argument initially as to whether photography was an art or science, and I’m interested in the crossover. The work feels like art photography but I’m recording using an objective approach,’ says Pickering.

Her Public Order images – a set of rather grey, depressing streets and buildings – could be part of a television set for a gritty northern drama, but are actually carefully constructed for police riot training. Frick’s Nightclub has dangling bags just out of shot to represent the crowds police must get through in a fracas. In Front Garden the training centre has, with painstaking attention to detail, actually planted the garden, despite it just being a set. Explosion images have been taken at manufacturers’ testing grounds and military training grounds during demonstrations of pyrotechnic products, while Fire Scene and Incident are bodies of work both shot at the Fire Service College in the Cotswolds.

The Fire Scene photographs each show a room where a controlled fire has been started, so that trainee forensic scientists – who are provided with witness statements – can practice uncovering exactly what happened. The Incident shots, all in black and white, depict the aftermath of a fire in a bedroom or (in White Goods) a line-up of blackened washing machines and cookers. ‘The fire fighters go in with breathing apparatus in the dark to find the fire, and you can see where they’ve scraped past the wall, using it as a guide to move around. I went in between exercises to take photographs and used matt prints to echo the surfaces of the objects and the spaces.’

An interesting aspect that Pickering notes is the type of society being represented, via the buildings the police have chosen to construct for their riot training. ‘The buildings look like a certain type of housing, with a kebab shop and nightclub. The imagined occupants of these buildings are low-income, so British class sys-­tems and the complexity of stereotypes all fed into my investigation.’

Like Goldsmith, Pickering wants the viewer to unravel the narrative, imagining the background scenarios for the fire or riots. In her sublimation printing, for example, Goldsmith references the psychological Rorschach ink-blot test used in forensic assessment cases to determine someone’s mental well-being. Seams of garments, such as the blue dress Erupted, to be exhibited as a photograph, have been opened up, with the printing representing feelings that can’t be contained, spilling out in a kind of psychological seepage.

Outbursts is an installation in which a dress will be clamped to one of Sir John Soane’s tables in the gallery, recalling police cordons round evidence sites, the cordons here being nametapes that tell snippets of a story, attached with pins around the stains Goldsmith has printed. The nametapes and stitching are part of her newest work, evolving out of sewing new ones for her daughter at school – and somehow it feels her most personal. Her stories all stem from her family: in Outpourings on an English Landscape, the tapes around the stains on a Laura Ashley-type dress tell a tale of her mum’s, about a sister collapsing on Bow High Street; the incident represented as if it had been a supernova ripping through Goldsmith’s aunt.

Several pieces don’t have stains or cordons, but simply rely on nametapes to tell the story. Garments are turned inside out, each beginning with a two-worded tape, with hundreds more then stitched on, as if the story is binding the wearer in like a strait jacket, or swirling out to the edge of a skirt. ‘I was thinking about how my daughter’s name is her identity, but actually she has a story and she’ll carry that around with her through her life. Most of us only have one story and it mutates a little as we grow, so I worked with that idea,’ she says. ‘Some of my work is very technological, but this is the simplest thing you could do. Intricate embroidery wouldn’t be appropriate; it needs to look like someone’s mum has done it.’ There’s even a wedding dress: this belonged to her brother in-law’s mother, who lived in Xenia in Ohio, where they once had 10 tornadoes in one day. Goldsmith listened to weather reports from that day and used descriptions of the storm as a metaphor for the internal emotional storm someone might feel on their wedding day.

Goldsmith’s and Pickering’s work will be exhibited side by side, so that their methods and outcomes can be juxtaposed and contrasted. What’s clear is that both have developed a synthesis with science, encouraging us to think about many issues, from forensics to identity and the make-up of society. And it’s this new perspective that’s exciting. As Goldsmith says, ‘We’re both getting people to think, and – like forensics – we’re both finding ways to reveal what’s already there. That’s what this work is about. It doesn’t have to be real.’