Open studios with Arabee Beveridge: Thoughts on the launch of the 2024 installation I wish I’d spent more time at work
I recently went to an open studios on the outskirts of London that plays with some questions (as someone who is desperately in search of a job) that I have yet to truly face:
Do you really wish you’d spent more time at work?
I wish I’d spent more time at work is open to both a purely aesthetic observation and deep conversation. On the surface it opens the viewer to a familiar gallery scene. The studio is populated by conceptually interacting but visually disconnected sculptural and painted pieces. Upon first entry into the studio, the space is ostensibly set up to imitate an office environment. There is a wheelie chair sat at a desk space, a typewriter loaded, filing cabinet skins pinned up against the wall and on cardboard boxes, crows linger around one corner of the room, their presence felt deeply as observers of the scene. Beside the filing cabinets hang manuscript pieces that fall from ceiling to floor an analogue iteration of financial wiki pages, and the walls are adorned with paintings of screaming babies dressed in suits or mothers leaving babies in filing cabinets.
This set, as a whole, crafts an interface between the act of becoming a mother and what we understand as work. At the same time it explores the delineation between home and work: the production of motherhood and the production of money. Its a space which asks more questions than it answers and leaves the viewer with a sense of deep seated disconcertion.
The paintings, which fill the white room with colour, most explicitly evoke the idea and imagery of motherhood. Filling one of the white walls of the space hangs a diptych. The graphic lights and darks lack any of the traditional comfort that we may associate with a motherly scene. The viewer instead is imbued with a dark sense of foreboding. The comic book like structure of the side by side paintings potentially narrate an act of abandonment. First we see a simple filing case of babies, alone on the mountainside, before moving our eyes to see a woman holding a baby by the same filing cabinet. It is implied, although not necessarily certain, that the figure in the second painting is leaving rather than taking the baby in her arms. The disconcerting emotions brought about by this scene are perhaps drawn from the sense of complicity that the paintings offer. You are an observer of an act of either deep love or complex betrayal; arguably both actions could be interpreted both ways. This fluctuation of meaning hangs over different aspects of the work. Conversations in the room seem to thread in multiple directions - to abortion and abortion rights, to the complexity of childbirth, to the financial aspects of all of the above. As a viewer your mind is brought to capital and it is strange that the idea of money and motherhood seem so at odds with each other when illustrated in this way.
This is displayed in alignment to the loose skin flaps of the filing cabinets that invites with a haunting feeling of human sacrifice to the corporate world. There is a sense of selling ones autonomy to either corporation or to motherhood. The lack of sense of community within the pieces is almost alarming: the figures in the paintings are lonely and alone against a vast landscape, the office chair and desk are set up for one; it is a cubicle and watched over by managerial presence in the form of the crows and the paintings and the filing cabinets occupy the space standing alone as a body might. The family unit that is so the basis of the capitalist structure has been disintegrated and isolated and spread open for a viewer to see in a new and disconcerting manner. Arabee draws the viewer’s attention back to the title of the piece - I wish I’d spent more time at work - through this deconstruction. The funny dichotomy of motherhood, one might argue, is that, in accepting and leaning into it, a sacrifice of one kind or another must be made: this could be financial independence, autonomy, a relationship with a partner, a relationship with a child.
In the most traditional and straightforward interpretation of the work’s title the viewer is invited ‘back’ into a corporate, financially focused, and bureaucratic environment, offering them their wish: more time at work. As with all of Arabee’s work however, the diversity in colour, texture, and dimension acts as a mirror to the disparity of inspiration and possible interpretation for the work. The room - rich with such contradictions - invites us, as participators of the set, to see beyond what is ostensibly a critique of corporate greed and to see instead the ways in which the capitalist structures - that we all inhabit - might determine something essential about the way we value our lives.
This open studio seems to me to display what is a constantly self-developing and self-formulating work in progress. It is a flayed performance of the human experience: an internal battle between income and enrichment that we must all face throughout our careers and our lives.
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