Thea McLachlan

In Ludwig Wittgenstein’s formulation, words find their meaning from their use in a sentence and in the world. A table is a table not because it has four legs, but because it is used at breakfast for eating. A window is not a window because it is an object of glass in a wall, but because a viewer peers through it to the room beyond.

In Direct Contact, Tallulah Hood troubles her viewer’s understanding of the function and value of objects. A wooden sled is transformed into a sun lounger. A bin lid is cast and preserved. Steel taps with multiple faucets seem to suit both the ward of the hospital and a kitchen island. Hood is interested in what these everyday objects emote in us. A sled is used for play, but is also a tool of transport. A sunlounger is placed by a resort pool, but a stretcher lifts someone to safety. There is a closeness in the shape and curve and function of objects of health and those of leisure.

To put differently Wittgenstein’s definition, an object gets its meaning from the money that is paid for it. In Direct Contact, Hood explores the shifting notions that are attached to leisure and health. Things become objects of play, or of necessity, or of injury, or of wellbeing, depending on who is looking and who is paying.

In When We Dead Awaken, Adrienne Rich writes:
The fact of being separate enters your livelihood like a piece of furniture —a chest of seventeenth-century wood
from somewhere in the North

The title for the show, Direct Contact, reflects Hood’s interest in connection—and how sculptures and people interact. On the windows, there are images of windows placed onto glass. The images are of shafts of light, in red and blue, overlaid with scenes of interiors, and the viewer’s own reflection in the window (squinting, peering, staring). Like the sled converted to a sunlounger, the window works build confusion. There is a loss of trust in the viewer’s relationship to the sculpture, an anxiety about how the viewer’s body occupies the space with the sculptural works.

In the exhibition, sculptures—these physical things that sit and hang in a room—act as intermediaries between people. Hood interrogates the distance and closeness that an object exhibits between two; the space that that object introduces from our separate responses and variegated reactions: all of our omg crazy feelings that appear when we look at the things that are in the room with us. Direct Contact is a show about being moved by objects and the gap that that embrace creates.