Tracy Marshall-Grant considers…
Springclean #4 2001 by Sian Bonnell
This image by Sian Bonnell is one I have used in exhibitions, projects and as gifts for my female friends and daughter. It is one of my personal favourites by her. Sian’s work often divides the crowd. Some see her as a woman working in the traditions of landscape photography, others see her as a feminist representing women and the domestic chore. Some find her work playful, others see a darker underbelly to it.
I fall somewhere in the middle. Knowing Sian personally over the years and having worked with her as a curator and project collaborator, I know she is playful and deeply thoughtful as well as sensitive in her work and her overall approach to photography and her place within it.
Go wild
This image was taken in spring 2001, as part of her series When the Domestic meets the Wild, which was an enquiry into the repetitive domestic experience and the desire to escape it and go a bit wild. Something I imagine many of us have often felt. By placing a number of key domestic chore-related objects from indoors into the outdoors as part of the series (including gloves, clothes pegs and feather dusters) Bonnell created a comic and amusing look at the domestic within the traditions of landscape photography.
The image here always makes me smile – at first look. It represents the spring regrowth, the flowering, and colours of the hedgerows. It shouts tulips and daffodils and early spring flowers at me. It makes me feel bright, springlike with positivity and thoughts of new possibilities. It does all this but with a smirk and a tongue-incheek flavour, with the bright rubber gloves and their amusing, comical placement along the roadside verges.
Yet there is much more to this image. If you look closer, you can see barbed wire. You can see a second layer of fencing beyond the gloves. You can see the gloves tangled in the wire itself. This is all taking that darker underbelly of her work and picking it up subtly to dilute the humour of the image and to make you think twice.
The image was made during the
