Work-in-progress in Rosie's studio

‘You haven’t got me at my best today, I’m afraid,’ says Rosie Gibbens as she unlocks a heavy set of doors that lead onto a busy street in the heart of Covent Garden. I know the feeling. It’s 7pm and I’m more than a little flustered having power-walked across Leicester Square to get to her studio on time. As it transpires, she needn’t have worried. Even after a long day in the studio, she’s articulate, funny, quick to correct any erroneous assumptions I make about her practice and even quicker to offer her own explanations with generosity and care.

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I follow her into the depths of the building. One of five abandoned premises transformed into affordable studios by The Bomb Factory Art Foundation, what was once a French Connection now houses 10 artists working across diverse mediums, including the performances, sculptures, installations and videos that comprise Rosie’s practice.

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As we enter her working space, I am confronted by a work-in-progress laid out in the centre of the floor. I sidestep around the large textile squares arranged in a gridded, quilt-like formation. Marbled in red and pink to evoke a sea of microscopic cells, each square is embellished with something disturbingly bodily in nature: a pair of stuffed black gloves, disembodied googly eyes or enlarged, close-up photographs of what might be orifices or nondescript innards. ‘Is that a butthole?’ I almost ask, eyeing a puckered circle of skin. I manage to stop myself, aware that it might not be the most appropriate of opening gambits…

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We sit down at a long table underneath which a small electric heater valiantly attempts to churn hot air into the open expanse of the otherwise unheated room. As Rosie makes green tea (lemon for me, ginger for her), I have the uncanny sensation of being watched. With a start, I find my gaze returned by an unblinking cluster of blue-and-green-irised eyes staring out from the breast of an apron-cum-humanoid sculpture hung on a nearby wall. 

Made by Rosie for her 2021 exhibition, Soft Girls, it is one of several textile sculptures that she fuses with domestic appliances and exercise equipment to perform suggestive acts and stoic stripteases, exploring the entanglement of erotic and consumer desires.

An enduring line of inquiry in her practice, she seeks to heighten the absurdity she observes in the rituals of daily life. Through her bodily interactions with made sculptures and found objects, she reimagines these activities in unfamiliar, humorous and often disquieting ways. Making the everyday strange, she demonstrates how the behaviours and modes of consumption that shape gender performativity and sexual desire are constructed to reflect a set of values. In this act of revealing their construction, she suggests that they might be reconfigured to imagine alternative ways of being.

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I’m curious, how does an artist whose practice is so directly centred on the physicality of their own body occupy the studio? ‘I don’t really spend that much time here working out performances,’ she says. ‘I spend time in here making, and if I want to try things I’ll do it at home.’

It is perhaps no surprise that Rosie’s practice moves so fluidly between these two spaces. After all, it is the minutiae of daily life that serve as both inspiration and subject matter. Ever tried applying lipstick with a gadget that simultaneously brushes your partner’s teeth in uncomfortably close proximity? Or worn a body-enhancing Mr Muscle suit made from blue-and-white cloths to combine the chore of cleaning with a workout? She has.

Even the materials of Rosie's artmaking often come to her in the course of daily life. She only has to walk down a street to find a tantalisingly retro ‘Tummy Trimmer’ (a spring-like abs toning machine) or a broken baby carrier waiting to be reimagined as a sculptural appendage.

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After a demonstration of said Tummy Trimmer in action, conversation soon turns to our shared backgrounds working in costume. ‘What are the differences between theatrical production and performance art?’ I ask. She explains that by freeing herself from the constraints of an external script or choreography, she has found rehearsal to be an unnecessary aspect of her practice. ‘Often I’ll just think it through,’ she says of her performances. ‘List out the actions, memorise the list and try it out in the gallery.’ 

Her primary preoccupation during the preparatory period is instead dedicated to how to stage her actions within the gallery space itself, and particularly how to infringe upon the audience’s determination to remain detached at a safe distance. Recognising their tendency to stand at the furthest edges of a room, she often performs parts of her sequences up against the walls, herding the audience from one side of the space to the other. ‘If you can disrupt their safety, then that’s great,’ she says with a grin, wanting individuals to be confronted by the activities of her performance.

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‘Do you think of yourself as “in character” when you perform?’ I ask, wondering how Rosie conceives of herself when in front of an audience. She shifts in her seat, expressing resistance to the idea. ‘No,’ she says eventually. ‘Or’, she concedes, ‘if I am, it’s like the thinnest character ever.’

She tells me that each performance is thought through in the form of a chain reaction. One action leads to the next in sequences guided by the ‘perverse inner logic’ that she has devised over the years of her artmaking. Consequently, her own body is understood to function more like a tool within this system, rather than a character. ‘I’m just doing things,’ she explains. ‘I almost feel like I’m doing a job. I operate this pulley,’ she says, miming the action in the air between us. ‘Do this thing,’ picking up a thread unpicker and placing it forcefully back down on the table. ‘So in that way, it takes the pressure off how I do something, because I just do it.’ 

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Gender theorists often speak of the ‘mechanisms of desire’ to describe the social, cultural and behavioural processes that drive us through life. In performance, Rosie turns this metaphorical idea of mechanism into a methodology as she works her way through a production line of absurd actions.

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She may not be in character, but Rosie has developed a signature look that she adopts in performance: long blonde hair braided into plaits (‘it’s an exaggerated, clichéd expression of femininity to have very long Victorian hair’), clothing that references office wear or the uniforms worn by nurses and beauticians, and the recurring use of a pair of nude high-heeled shoes.

Through this careful cultivation of her own image, Rosie plays with gendered ideas of beauty, labour and the erotic, heightening elements of her self-presentation in daily life. Today, for instance, she might be wearing oversized blue denim dungarees but her hair is still braided in a signature plait – a motif that serves as a recurring visual cue in her work.

Shorthand identifiers, such as a hairstyle, are integrated into Rosie's humanoid sculptures to cast them as ‘proxies or avatars’. When given its own blonde braid, for instance, a uterus-shaped torso with legs instantly becomes an extension of her own body, rather than an anonymous assemblage of plushie corporeal forms. 

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I wonder if her relationship to the sculptures changes when they become proxy versions of herself? ‘Do they take on their own sense of agency?’ I ask. ‘No,’ she says firmly. ‘I’m puppeteering them. Bringing them to life but within my realm. They’re kind of under my dominion.’ Laughing, she adds, ‘I’d like to hope they feel excited by it!’ 

The humanoid sculptures may be under her authority but they are resistant to objectification. Rosie shows me a photograph of a sculpture presented in her 2023 exhibition Planned Obsolescence. Riffing on the erotics of office culture and the synthesis of bodies and technology imagined as ‘low-tech cyborgs’, a female form is fed into printer head-first. While the figure’s bottom is raised in a provocative pose, the sculpture troubles the gendered dynamics of the gaze. A pair of large eyes are sewn into the rounds of her thong-clad buttocks so that, far from being objectified, the sculpture returns the audience's gaze. In so doing, it unsettles the hierarchical dynamics of subject and object, the human and nonhuman. ‘It’s kind of questioning and looking back,’ explains Rosie. ‘It’s asking “how do you want to read this?”’

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And this encapsulates Rosie’s approach to artmaking in a nutshell. Hers is an art that poses questions rather than providing definitive statements. ‘I don’t have all the answers about these questions that I’m asking, about the way society is, the way I relate to gender or sex,’ she explains. ‘I’m just raising things that chime weirdly in some way and trying to unpack them.’ In employing this propositional mode, she invites audiences to place themselves in positions of enquiring discomfort, encouraging them to interrogate their own relationship to what is played out in front of them.

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Before I leave, I have to know how Rosie holds her nerve. Given her unflinching preoccupation with the entanglement of the absurd and the erotic, I wonder if she ever worries she will push the content of a work too far. Does she bounce her ideas off a confidant before performance? ‘Not really,’ she replies. ‘I just see how it feels. Trust myself.’

And there it is, I think, as we stand up and retrace our steps back to the front door. Despite her initial apology, Rosie exudes a compelling self-assuredness when talking about her work, which powerfully underpins the questioning nature of her artmaking. Don’t be fooled by her soft-girl aesthetic. Her world may be one of cute plushie sculptures, sugar-sweet hues and long blonde braids, but this is art with bite. And it’s Rosie’s teeth that are bared.

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Kitty Gurnos-Davies

27 February 2024

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