Furr Exhibition

This is another post from the archives: the Furr show from Kudos Gallery, curated by Penelope Benton, from 2000. The other artists in the show were Juliette Arent, Nicole Barakat, Elspeth Cameron, Simon Cooper, Chet Danby, Tania Petra Daniels, Boots Dexter, Hayden Fowler, Anna Jaaniste, Kitty Kat, Kate Mitchell, Sam Roseman, Jenny Wilder and Yiorgos Zafiriou. The first image above was the invitation to the show, with each invitation having a piece of fake fur stuck on it. Below is the catalogue, and the fur here is just a printed image.



I joked at the time that the show should have been called "Furr, with Rodney Love and Friends" because I had so many works in the exhibition!

My work extended down one side of the gallery:


This is Hairy Ted (sitting forlornly on the floor in the photo above). It was made of Hessian and stuffed with hair, so little bits of hair stuck out through the holes.

I wrote about this work once before (see this post). I'm just cutting and pasting the text:
This was a piece I made for the Furr show at Kudos, another great show curated by Penelope Benton. It was called Tiny Teddies. It's a giant Tiny Teddy made out of Tiny Teddies. Penelope liked the idea and thought two of them would look great. I dutifully made two, but regretted the decision when it came time to dismantle the work. The teddies had been glued directly to the gallery wall and proved rather difficult to dislodge! It smelled great, though.

This work is Shattered By Fate. Each of the hair-filled wire boxes was velcroed to the wall. I later framed the work (see here).

I've also written about this work before. This " is called Death Closes All, from 2000. It was exhibited in the Furr show at Kudos Gallery. This was an early experiment, and only has a very thin central warp (of linen), with the unspun hair just placed in the warp and flowing out the sides, and sometimes relooping back into the warp. It was about 3-4 metres long (3 pieces of different lengths were sewn together) and was hung down the wall, and flowed onto the floor."



This is one of the earliest hair textiles of mine. It's called Arbeit Macht Frei, and is another Holocaust-related work from the early 21st century.