Cathy Wilkes' care-full matter-scapes: female affects of care, feminist materiality and vibrant things

Abstract

The relationship between corporeal feminism and materialisms has been addressed in a number of recently emerging writings and artistic projects. In this essay, I focus on Cathy Wilkes' exhibition in the British Pavilion at the 58th Venice Biennale in 2019 (although I suggest rather than being a singular event, it belongs to and further evolves her overarching constellation weaving art and life together) and explore her practice of meaning-making and questioning of production of knowledge driven by non-representationalist methodology understood as an affective material inter-action. I propose that Wilkes' practice performs embodied feminist materiality in matter-scapes activating threshold spaces in which intimate care-full encounters emerge. The figure of the threshold animates matter with/in which subjectivity is embedded and embodied, nurturing a care-full response-ability and a political responsibility in the context of patriarchal neoliberal and late-capitalist social structures marked by poverty, unpaid reproductive labour, precarity of work, refugee crisis, incomprehension and social injustice. It invokes vulnerable (resistant) transitions and liminal spaces. Wilkes' constellations grow together through vital matter and liveability.