Janice Kerbel, 'Notes from Sink / Routine for 24 Women' (2018).
Following the live performance of Janice Kerbel's major new artwork 'Sink’, commissioned by The Common Guild as part of Festival 2018, we are delighted to present an extension of the project with a series of double-sided prints that further explore the language of synchronisation.
Janice Kerbel, 'Notes from Sink / Routine for 24 Women' (2018). Photo: Ruth Clark.
'Sink' is a synchronised swimming routine for 24 women, which was first presented on 3 August 2018 in the distinctive surroundings of the Western Baths, a Victorian swimming pool in Glasgow. Using synchronisation to explore the tensions between body and language, movement and stillness, the individual and the collective, the prints act as a score for and record of a performance. Kerbel treats paper as the surface of water, notating moves and arrangements by hand with use of rubber stamps.
Kerbel regularly works with printed form to invoke real and suggested action. Text-based works such as 'Fight' (2018), a series of silkscreen prints, score an unarmed fight for a group of individuals, while 'Remarkable' (2007), a series of silkscreen prints taking 19th-century fairground posters as its inspiration, heralds the arrival of a series of imagined characters. These printed works both document and instruct action that may or may not have taken place, blurring the distinction between fact and fiction, description and premonition.
