Taking stuff and stuffness as its theme, this talk considers the way stuff sits at the edges of our attention and requires a kind of peripheral gaze; looked at too closely, its sense of stuffness slips. Yet it is precisely stuff’s slippery nature that provides a kind of joyful resistance, eluding capture, slipping through the net. Although ‘stuff’ quickly tends towards the abject, bringing to mind the perils of hoarding, dumping and waste, it also refuses to be commodified, categorised, kept. To explore this, the session addresses the work of American artist Eva Hesse.

Writing to a friend in 1965 Hesse noted: ‘Last Friday 15 minutes before this place closed I bought liquid casting rubber and filler and separator. I experimented all weekend. […] Today (I used it all up over the weekend) I went to get a larger supply. Its possibilities are endless.’ An interest in what you do with stuff you come across by chance, just before the store closes, formed an integral part of Hesse’s process, and leads this discussion into stuff. For Hesse, this resulted in around 70 studioworks, small abstract forms that were discovered on a shelf in her studio on her death in 1970, and sat as an undercurrent to her more formal practice. They were exhibited once (sort of), and given away to friends, yet they were never claimed as either ‘work’ or ‘non-work’. ‘After-work’ might be a possible descriptor? It shouldn’t really matter. The studioworks – like much of Hesse’s work that used latex and fibreglass – are deteriorating, they are falling apart.

At the time, the refusal of the studioworks to be categorised or named presented a strong feminist response to the gendered nature of the context Hesse was working in. Through these small works she claimed the studio as her site of research and pushed back against the pressures of an art market always-already primed to pounce. Their existence also reflected back on the very ‘stuffness’ of studio practice, its everydayness, as a space to experiment, try, set things aside, repeat, and fail. Yet fifty years on, what do they do for us now? How do we treat Hesse’s ‘stuff’? As forgotten objects now reclaimed, the studioworks become meta-objects, through which to imagine new, unruly futures.

We are committed to making our sessions as accessible as possible. If you are unable to pay the full amount for this class, please reach out to us via email at [email protected] and we will provide you with a discount code.