Bottom Wallpaper

Abigail Lane

  • Year 1994
  • Edition Unlimited edition
  • Material/Technique Tapetendruck
  • Dimensions Variable
  • Category Installation
  • Collection Kunststiftung Ingvild und Stephan Goetz, München

The wallpaper Bottom Wallpaper from 1994 by Abigail Lane displays a direct connection to the human body. It consists of a series of buttock impressions, which were transferred directly onto the paper from the skin.
The wallpaper is part of a series created between 1992 and 1997, for which the artist mostly worked with a female model. The works were first exhibited in 1992 at the Karsten Schubert Gallery in London. In later exhibitions, the wallpaper was often presented together with chairs that had their seats replaced by inked pads re-integrated into their seats. The chairs referred to the creative process, as the works Blue Inked Chair (1996) and Ink Pad (Blue) (1994) do. 

Q & A with Abigail Lane

How was the original work Bottom Wallpaper created and what did the creation process looked like?

The original Bottom Wallpaper, 1992, was made directly from the body of a female model; Ink/paint was printed directly from skin onto cheap household lining paper. Gallery and museum walls were therefore wrapped in this intimate activity and its audiences looked at, and were surrounded by, a kind of artistic mooning – both joke and protest. Although neither the prints nor the process of making them was rude as such (the marks appear more like lungs than bottoms and the making is a calm process of lifting ink from glass to skin to paper), the Bottom Wallpaper, although decorative, does bring a kind of defiance to the gallery walls.

What are the differences in today's digital wallpaper production process and why did you choose wallpaper for this work?

Bottom Wallpaper is now a digitalized process; its machine-made marks are lifted exactly from the original prints, but it is still produced using the traditional cheap wallpaper material, which must be pasted to the walls in strips. In this way it retains a level of domesticity and homeliness as opposed to the now abundant large format printed matter used in wider commercial and exhibition activity. This digital version has been created to emulate the irregularity of the original repeat - in which, despite best efforts, no prints were the same or exactly straight; somewhat of a conundrum in wallpaper terms.

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