A woman must continually watch herself. She is almost continually accompanied by her own image of herself. Whilst she is walking across a room or whilst she is weeping at the death of her father, she can scarcely avoid envisaging herself walking or weeping. From earliest childhood she has been taught and persuaded to survey herself continually. And so she comes to consider the surveyor and the surveyed within her as the two constituent yet always distinct elements of her identity as a woman.
John Berger, Ways of Seeing
In Splash Club, Emily Hartley-Skudder works across installation, readymade sculpture, and painting to set the stage for an exhibition that both celebrates and critiques cleanliness and beauty rituals in camp luxury. Unveiling her clamshell-themed stockpile, she offers up a playful femme antidote to relic-like Gentlemen’s Clubs.
For a practice fixated on the rituals surrounding cleanliness and the environments our bodies interact with, there has been a noted absence of depictions of the body in her work. Earlier projects by Hartley-Skudder left a suggestive space for the body: paintings depicted colourful douching devices or snake-oil beauty tools, installations included colour-coordinated hand towels or picture frames hung like mirrors levelled at head height. In Splash Club, bodies themselves make an entrance—bodies washing, brushing hair, contemplating, confronting, with head high or bowed, alone or in company, dripping, undressing, surrounded by baths, pools, and sinks, almost always naked.
In this project, Hartley-Skudder’s processes of selection and collection extend beyond her usual found objects, to existing artworks. Assuming the roles of artist and curator, she positions new paintings from her time as the 2023 Frances Hodgkins Fellow alongside artworks from collections across Aotearoa. When viewed en masse, these works by other artists communicate patterns of preoccupation within beauty standards and Western art history which privilege very particular ideals about cleanliness and hygiene in relation to gender, race, and class.
Hartley-Skudder compiles these historical and contemporary works as a dataset which catalogues representations of feminine bodies through two interwoven art historical genres—the ‘Birth of Venus’ and ‘La Toilette’. The latter reveals art history’s voyeuristic preoccupation with women cleaning themselves—a trope that suggests a woman’s body is perpetually unclean and in need of constant management. The figures at their toilet often look away, while Venus strikes a pose, putting her body on show for the viewer. Splash Club frames and offers back contemporary and historical assumptions and experiences of body-ownership to explore the roles of ‘surveyor’ and ‘surveyed’.
Cleanliness and beauty routines offer a semblance of control, but they are also an ideology used to control ‘unruly’ bodies. Even as Hartley-Skudder’s practice foregrounds the smooth texture and perfect veneer of ‘hygienic’ surfaces—faux marble, resin, ceramic, skin—her work makes visible preoccupations with blemishes, imperfections, discomfort, and self management, which are more than skin-deep.
