A sonic assemblage: a review of Sarah Villeneau’s exhibition Visceral Echoes, DGLAM, Doncaster Gallery, 26 October-11 January 2025
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Visceral Echoes was Sarah Villeneau’s first solo exhibition in a public gallery of ceramic sculpture, hosted by DGLAM, Doncaster’s swish new gallery, library and museum, encased behind a glass frontage that incorporates the restored former High School for Girls. The exhibition featured an extensive range of work with some surprising aspects: stoneware forms concealed found objects and scrap materials, some roped together, many of them resembling tubular sections of the large intestine. Other pieces incorporated the artist’s hair: in one piece hair protruded from a curved ceramic wrapped in what looked like rolls of compressed leather. Many of the works alluded to parts of the body, but a key aspect was the aural theme. Indeed, the entire exhibition reverberated with sonic references, a characteristic that was drawn out by a vocal performance staged in the gallery space on the final weekend of the show.

Clay body

There is a deep connection between clay and the body…[…]…The way it resonates with flesh and bodily process or metaphorical registers is complex. Phoebe Collings-James, 2021

Reviewing the work in Villeneau’s exhibition, references to human anatomy, through the ‘clay body’, were predominant in many of the exhibits. Organic Form, Hanging Sculpture, Hair out of Place, It’s personal and the cabinet of four small Hearts all directly referred to parts of the body, to internal organs, ventricles, arteries, musculature. Surfaces simulate flesh and flapping skin. With its pelvic forms, its leathery surfaces stitched with twine, pleated labia-like folds and tresses of hair, Hanging Sculpture could be some kind of fetish object with a ritualistic aura and esoteric powers. It resembles stitched and pierced skin that simultaneously evokes intense physical sensations of ecstatic pleasure and pain, strength and vulnerability. Various apertures, such as the small hole in Organic form, suggest the orifices of the body.

With skintone and grey flesh hues, Villeneau’s ceramic entrails, organs and body fragments have certainly been known to both attract and repel viewers but, in my view, they are neither abject nor morbid. The forms convey a playfulness, a jouissance : as Jo Isaacs indicated in the 1990s, there is something powerful about adopting women’s laughter about the body, as the polymorphic orgasmic body is a bit of a joke really. Although there is no declared positionality or feminist polemics, Villeneau’s work has a subdued eroticism and it presents a strong affirmatively female voice. In sympathy with Isaacs, her objects invite us to laugh because they poke fun at the absurdity of the unseen bits inside our bodies.

Of course there is nothing new about artists working with the body as a material and reference point but the body re-emerged as a site of social, political and cultural inscription in the 1990s through the writings of feminist philosophers such as Judith Butler and Elizabeth Grosz. Besides engaging with the gendered body as constructed and performed, new ideas emphasised the body as a site of potentiality, process and practice. Significantly, this was accompanied by a ‘corporeal turn’ in contemporary practice as artists interrogated the feeling body, the erotic, affective, abject and grotesque body, its vitality and permeability. Often amidst condemnation, artists adopted a range of strategies, working with multiple fragmented body parts, organs and body fluids. As Barbara Kruger’s iconic billboard artworks declared at the time, the body had become ‘a battleground’. In 1992, Thomas Lacquer pointed out that the history of Western civilisation has both hidden the body from view and explored it obsessively. Indeed, he highlighted that the very premise of the landmark exhibition, Corporal Politics was controversial merely because making the body ‘in all its vulnerable, disarticulated, morbid aspects, in its apertures, curves, protuberances, where the boundaries between self and world are porous’ was somehow perceived as ‘indecent’. The reception of artistic practices that reference the body has moved on, and yet adverse responses to particular materials continue to resonate.  A recent exhibition of contemporary artists working with hair at Heide Museum (Bulleen, Australia, 2024) explored the tension between hair as an expression of individuality and a kind of disembodied unity.  Since the 1990s, the artist Mona Hatoum, has worked extensively with hair and her work has continued to evoke pain and disgust in equal measure.

In a number of ceramic pieces, Villeneau’s use of her own (as well as synthetic) hair is a case in point. For example, Hair out of Place presents us with a voluptuous folded grey ceramic form with flesh-coloured underbelly and a thick tress of blonde hair spilling out of one side. According to the artist herself, these kinds of hairy pieces have unsettled - and even ‘disgusted’- visitors and viewers. Female body hair is a symbol of sexual maturity and both its retention and removal has long been subject to gendered controversy and taboo. Perhaps also it is the slow pace of hair’s decomposition that perturbs, as once detached it is dead yet defiantly lives on.  With their obsessive cult of the dead, locks of hair were used extensively in Victorian mourning jewellery and pulverised hair was used as a pigment in grief ornaments. In the 1990s, Helaine Posner noted how, for the Victorians, hair ‘became the corporeal auto-icon par excellence – the favoured synecdoche - the real standing for the symbolic, perhaps not eternally incorruptible but long lasting enough, a bit of a person that lives eerily on as a souvenir’.
Interestingly, when we focus closely on the surfaces and contours of Villeneau’s works, for example Organic Form, there is a suggestion of the kinds of amoebic forms that might be revealed through microscopic attention to human cells. Unsurprisingly, Villeneau’s practices related to the digestive tracts of the body have led to plans to collaborate with Birmingham University on research into gut microbiomes. From this, she hopes to produce a body of ceramic work in response to emerging scientific and medical knowledge.

Clay both records the imprint of the body and is molded (sic) by the body. Therefore, its paradox lies in the fact that it is both an extension of the self and an entity apart from itself. The Body, The Object, The Other, 2020-21 

For Villeneau, as for other artists working in ceramics, there is a direct connection between clay and the body. She sees herself, and her own body, in a kind of ‘dialogue’ with clay.  In our conversations, she has stressed how she works intuitively through handling and manipulating the raw material. Perhaps it is no coincidence that ‘clay body’ is a term specifically used in ceramics to denote a mixture of clays and other mineral substances blended to achieve a particular purpose. Villeneau embraces the volatility of the technical processes involved, relishing the unpredictability and alchemical serendipity of working with clay and fire.

Bricolage and objects ‘out of place’

A really important characteristic of Villeneau’s recent work is the way she has started to use bricolage as a working method. Increasingly, she incorporates found objects, alongside reconfigurations of previously exhibited stoneware pieces, into some of the ceramic sculptures. Post Truth Barbie, Ugh and Salvage are all combinations of assemblages of objects ‘out of place’ with crafted material. Playfully, Ugh offers the viewer a ludicrous conglomeration, an assemblage based on one of her own ‘recycled’ stoneware vessels, its ‘orifices’ stuffed with a brush of red hair, hanging from a thread is a tiny 19thc religious book, the whole ringed around with rope.  From the 1970s, in a shift away from the minimal aesthetic of Bernard Leach-style pottery, a number of ceramic artists, particularly women such as Jacqueline Poncelet, Carol McNicoll and Gillian Lowndes, started to work with ‘readymade ceramics’ and found materials such as toys, plastic debris and discarded objects. Many others have worked with their legacy, as testified in a recent article in Ceramic Review which highlighted a raft of contemporary work incorporating natural, domestic and found objects, such as that produced by the Japanese artist Ryoji Koie, Canadian artist Linda Sormin and Mary Nagle. Apart from Post Truth Barbie, which is something of an anomaly for its very lack of ceramic material, Villeneau has incorporated objects in such a way that it is difficult to distinguish crafted elements from found objects. The idea of assembling and reassembling multiple pieces also confirms a shift that Villeneau has sensed is taking place in her approach to work, as she is moving towards creating a kind of bricolage practice that works with the artistic and curatorial methods associated with installation rather than the more conventional exhibition of independent craft-based objects presented in isolation from each other.

Sonic objects

For me, the most intriguing and playful piece in the exhibition was Tenderness Chords, a witty wordplay that also refers to the  tendinous cords of the heart. The foundation of the piece was an open ceramic vessel with guitar wires screwed across the largest aperture, creating a kind of DIY harp that was asking to be plucked. Three tiny copper bells dangled from wiggly threaded orange tipped hazel twigs that protruded from the vessel’s ‘ventricles’, each emerging from strands of a ‘grass skirt’ that the artist brought back from a trip to Papua New Guinea in the 1980s.  Along with some slate shards, with a slight breeze through the gallery space, this bricolage of materials held the promise of tinkly, tender, harmonies.
Around 2018, the first ‘sonic objects’ Villeneau made were an intentional attempt to create the sound of fluid and gas moving through the intestines. Some early pieces incorporated guitar wire, fishing line and removeable whistles. At an exhibition of these sonic clay forms, a visitor who happened to be a vet with intimate knowledge of the interior organs of various animals, suggested to her that he would have entitled the piece ‘borborygmus’, the onomatopoeiac term for rumbling guts. Subsequently, Villeneau produced a whole series of noise-making stoneware pieces entitled Borborygmi. On the last day of Visceral Echoes, members of the public were invited to ‘play’ these and an array of other clay objects as part of a performance, specially created by Villeneau, artist Walt Shaw and director Martin Archer, by the Sheffield-based improvising group Juxtavoices.

The form affects the listener in a dance of reflections in the space between. […]…The skin listens too. In fact the whole body listens in this heightened state of awareness. Pauline Oliveros, 2010

The final day of the exhibition was a chilly January afternoon, but Villeneau’s exhibition helped generate a warm communal hubbub of sound and bodies. The packed groundfloor café was positively buzzing, browsers tap-tapped on laptops in the library, children squealed with laughter in the Saturday afternoon kids’ art class. In Villeneau’s show, visitors shuffled around the industrial-looking plinths. Listening tubes adorn the wall, miniscule bells dangle from Tenderness Chords. A young girl put her ear to the trumpet on Hidden to detect the faintest sound of ants scurrying around. A huddle of bodies – improvising vocalists, Juxtavoices - gathered in small groups around each plinth. Muffled sounds, squeaks, whispers and gurgles built up to waves of undulating pitch and sonic fragments from the titles of the artworks to form a crescendo. Unexpectedly, in a moment of exquisite bathos, the air-conditioning kicked in and its drone was instantly taken up by the vocalists as part of the performance. As the murmuring subsided, bodies, artworks and the whole reconfigured building, seemed to come together as actants in a sonic assemblage.

In sum, Villeneau’s solo show, Visceral Echoes, presented a rich body of work that was consistent in theme and overall aesthetic and innovative in its multimedia, multisensory and bricolage-style approach. Close scrutiny revealed that this seemingly straightforward exhibition of crafted materials was deceptive. Many of the exhibits were mischievous actants: clay was disrupted by unwieldy objects ‘out of place’, vessels emitted low-level noisiness whilst others invited us to make sounds with them. For me, relishing the work’s ability for attraction and repulsion, Villeneau’s sense of playfulness won out in the end.

Gillian Whiteley
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Digital Echoes - DYCP Developing Your Creative Practice,
​Arts Council Award
​July 2024
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