Yvonne Mullock

With a nod and a wink, these works both titillate and make you laugh.

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Vogue, the high-fashion magazine, and natural history guides to fungi may seem odd traveling companions. But elements from both share space in Yvonne Mullock’s collages, on display until Aug. 31 as part of a group show, together but apart, at the Jarvis Hall Gallery in Calgary.  

An elegant hand with pointy red nails holds the curious, wonderfully named – and rather phallic – devil’s dipstick stinkhorn. Manicured fingers fondle the cap of the royal fly agaric. The bulky stem of the king bolete gets a firmer grip.

Not getting the innuendo? Then take a peek at Mullock’s website – where hands move suggestively as the cursor glides over them, steering you toward images of her work, a list of  exhibitions and a curriculum vitae. It’s funny. Kind of like Mullock herself.

“I do have a sense of humour,” Mullock says in an interview from Calgary, where she has lived for eight years.

Mullock grew up in Chester, an old Roman town south of Liverpool, and went to the Glasgow School of Art, where she began to develop a wide-ranging practice involving diverse media. 

An idea comes first, Mullock explains, and then she figures out which approach makes the most sense.

She has transformed panties into ceramic sculptures, collaborated on a printmaking project with a horse and played an upsized game of Pick Up Sticks with a motley crew of dogs, to name a few.

Her latest work, Gift-Love, a commission for Manning Hall at the Art Gallery of Alberta in Edmonton that will be unveiled Oct. 19, explores ideas of intimacy, touch, care and connection via a colossal  pair of tailored gloves.

Curator Lindsey Sharman notes the gloves, modelled on Mullock's hands, refer to a tradition from 16th-century Europe in which gloves were given as a pledge of affection, meant to protect, warm and comfort in a lover's absence. 

"Made to an enlarged scale, every detail is exaggerated to monumental proportions," says Sharman. "The exterior velvet is hand-dyed to the artist's exact skin tone, the visceral silk lining is corporeal and fleshy. Made from sumptuous fabrics, Gift-Love implements lavish techniques of high-end tailoring in its construction.

"While the work is a humorous example of artistic simulacrum and a reminder of the author as maker, the care in its handling also indicates the artist's intention in offering this gift of love as a monumental and tender token of affection meant for loved ones and strangers alike."

For Mushrooms of North America/Vogue, Mullock opted for collage, using images she clipped from books and magazines she bought at thrift stores soon after moving to Calgary.

She chose models with provocatively posed hands and matched them with mushrooms she thought were particularly phallic, gross or weird, creating playful compositions that explore human and fungi sexuality.

Eventually, she scanned the images digitally and enlarged them. At Jarvis Hall, 15 scanned and printed images are hung as unframed cutouts that float on the gallery wall.

Mullock’s porcelain panties are another cheeky project. 

She became fascinated by how women amass large collections of panties to wear with various outfits. These delicate garments age, stretch and develop holes, but also retain something of the body of the woman who wore them, echoing her folds and rolls.

Mullock decided to make porcelain slips of her own panties – basically immersing each pair in a creamy slurry of porcelain and water, then firing them in a kiln until the fabric burned away and the porcelain hardened.

The sculptures show details of seams, lace and patterning. Many look like they were simply abandoned as she undressed.

“I am a bit messy and I do leave my clothes on the floor,” says Mullock, who describes the works as self-portraits. 

Deeply intimate, the pieces are completely relatable. 

“It talks about my body without my body in it,” she says. “So it’s quite loaded.” 

Mullock’s website features many other projects. For Dark Horse, she made prints of cowboy hats with the help of a horse. A video shows Mullock placing a hat smeared with pigment, into the bottom of a contraption that looks somewhat like a stall. The horse is led in, and its weight causes the floor to drop, squishing the hat between two layers of paper. After the horse is led out, Mullock retrieves the prints.

Her Dog-Pick-Up-Sticks features long poles with painted ends. She has posted photos of dogs collecting them, following their own inner promptings. I'm not sure if it's what she intended, but the game somehow seems an apt metaphor for how artists work. ■

Together but apart, a group show that includes Yvonne Mullock, Robin Arseneault, Laura Findlay, Larissa Tiggelers, Patrick Dunford, Janine Hall, Corri-Lynn Tetz, Mark Dicey, Rachel MacFarlane, Jeff Nachtigall and John Will, is on view at the Jarvis Hall Gallery in Calgary from July 26 to Aug. 31, 2019. 

PS: Worried you missed something? See previous Galleries West stories here or sign up for our free biweekly newsletter.

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