Nina Saunders: Most Curious
Nina Saunders Blue Fjord 2010 (shoes by Tracey Neuls) Installation view
Nina Saunders first appeared in the mid-90s, with her rebuilt furniture causing a stir at the Saatchi Gallery. Drawing on her knowledge as a self-taught master upholsterer, Saunders’ interventions in found and recycled domestic chairs and sofas produce sculpture that is as visually unsettling as it is sumptuous. Her work is labour-intensive and expensive—she produces everything herself—so pieces are rare and, needless to say, completely unique. Funded commissions are often the only way new work can be seen; recent sightings have been single works at public galleries or at the Danish and Nordic pavilions at last year's Venice Biennale.
“Most Curious” was a three-way collaboration between Saunders, Sanderson textiles and Tracey Neuls, a shoe designer originally from Vancouver Island. It marked the opening of a new boutique for the latter in central London as well as the 150th anniversary of Sanderson. With the opening timed to coincide with London Fashion Week, the mix of esteemed British textile company, bespoke shoemaker and disconcerting sculptor seemed like niche-marketing overkill. Happily, it worked. Sanderson textiles provided the fabric used by Saunders to rebuild a decaying 1830s mahogany armchair and by Neuls to style the shoes in her spring/summer 2010 collection.
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Nina Saunders Blue Fjord 2010 (shoes by Tracey Neuls) Installation view |
In a spartan, empty shop, with footwear hanging from strings, Saunders' sculpture—entitled Blue Fjord—turned this hastily rehabbed (but upmarket) retail space into a fantasy of 19th-century domesticity and disconcerting Alice-in-Wonderland overtones. Surrounded by slender birch trunks, the sculpture dominated the room—unsurprisingly, given that its upholstery appeared to have spilled out of the confines of the chair's wooden frame, dripping onto the floor and under its own legs as if about to upend itself. A nearby pair of Neuls' exquisite shoes, covered in the same fabric as Blue Fjord, seemed to have been kicked off by someone escaping from the melting chair, merely adding to the suggestion of a hastily interrupted, frozen narrative that could resume at any moment. The floor-to-ceiling trees suggested a surreal, dystopian, rural idyll: if you go down to the woods today, you'll get far more than a teddy bears' picnic.
Here, a Danish artist, a Canadian shoemaker and a British textile manufacturer staged a mini-fantasia where fine art, luxury goods and classic design each fed off of and bestowed a particular kudos upon each other. And in this small corner shop in a Marylebone street, away from carefully assembled gallery or museum exhibition halls, Saunders’ wonderfully quixotic work had never looked better.
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Nina Saunders Blue Fjord 2010 (shoes by Tracey Neuls) Installation view |
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