Artist Barbara MacCallum claims androgyny as her creative terrain. “I’m interested in male and female, nothing too macho or too feminine but the gap in between,” she says. Her highly original, intimate and imaginative work combines sculpture, drawing, textiles and installation.
Blending male and female elements, MacCallum’s works are graceful, mysterious, emotional, and challenging. “My work has evolved through a collaborative relationship with my husband (Robert Johnson) who is a physicist; I cast his body and recycle his published papers giving a new existence to the detritus of science,” she says.. Johnson is a professor of engineering physics at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville.
“In a society that places science above art in its educational systems, its financial rewards and its methods of recognition, I am reversing the relationship by appropriating the materials of science, obliterating their usual function and reconfiguring science into art,” explains her artist’s statement.
A native of Belfast, Northern Ireland, MacCallum met Johnson in 1968 when he was doing research on atomic and molecular collision as a post doctorate at Queens University in Belfast. She was getting a fine arts with distinction degree at the Ulster College of Art and Design. She was reluctantly assigned to the textile department, the textile industry a mainstay in Belfast, only to one day put her handwork training to use in her own work.
“Bob is from Chicago and the first American I had ever met. At first I thought he was weird,” she says. “Although I hated physics in school, we were immediately attracted to each other; maybe as he is in theoretical physics and now noted for his creativity. He deals with atmospheres, space, moons and planets. Bob often describes himself as a frustrated artist and is happy to be part of my work.”
Johnson left Ireland to teach at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale, Ill. MacCallum joined him in 1970 and earned her Masters in Fine Arts from Southern Illinois. “The troubles were just beginning when I left Northern Ireland,” she recalls, “and when when I got to the U.S, it was a time of upheaval—the civil rights movement, the anti-war movement and the women’s movement to which I was especially drawn.”
At the Whitney Museum in New York she saw a show of quilts, works that seemed “acceptable” for women to make and yet were not labeled by name or considered art. “This sort of started me off on a series of quilts. I used Bob’s papers, doing things with them—ironing, sewing, doing things women traditionally did, taking men’s work and turning it into women’s work,” she says.
MacCallum had received a grant to work with a critic on a series of pieces on the work of Anselm Kiefer, a German painter, sculptor, and star in the New York art world galleries. “Many of the well-known women artists were overlooked as they were considered not to be as profitable,” she says. “I had chosen Kiefer as representative of how quickly a male artist can rise to the top compared with a female.” .
She laughs. “But after finishing that series and living in close quarters with Bob in Chicago, I realized I was living with the enemy and turned my attention to science as a metaphor for men’s work. Instead of focusing on Kiefer, I thought I should be focusing on someone close to me where I had firsthand knowledge of the disparate treatments we both received in our fields.”
MacCallum was teaching fiber art at the prestigious School of the Art Institute of Chicago where she received many invitations to give talks or judge art shows around the country. “I became very aware of how little money or support I was offered as an artist compared with similar invitations that Bob received as a scientist,” she says
“0n looking at the titles and the subjects of Bob’s papers I was struck by the beauty and the strangeness of the words, the titles and the illustrations in his work. To a physicist they mean one thing, but to an artist, they conjure up a totally different image—and that’s what I am interested in. I usually take the title of his paper as the basis for the work.”
Initially she manipulated Bob’s papers—washing, ironing, wringing out, baking, and sewing them. The finished piece was either flat on the wall or in relief. At some point, McCallum says, she started using casts of Bob’s body to support the sewing of his papers into theatrical garments. “I liked the idea of taking Bob’s research papers and ignoring the science contents while turning them into decorative theatrical scenarios.The work takes his science research and my art concepts and together they become something different yet a part of both of us.”
MacCallum describes her meticulous and labor intensive process. “With Bob’s cooperation, I cast his body or parts of it in plaster bandages, and then with many layers of words torn out of the papers. I then take the actual paper and treat it with women’s traditional work. I wash it, iron it, wring it out, burn or bake it and finally sew the pages together to make female garments. I like the idea of taking the male linear aspect of space physics, and turning it into female theatricality.”
The dramatic results MacCallum considers to be half female, half male, “otherworldly.” “They are male in being made from Bob’s body and the pieces are dressed in garments that are sort of theatrically female, bringing the two halves together.
“I’m also interested in fashion, particularly people who do designs that are androgynous who fall between male and female,” she adds, inspired by designer John Paul Gaultier, famous for having dressed Madonna in her iconic cone bra.
For many years, the married couple have lived in New York City for four months of the year. During that time, MacCallum goes to art shows and to the theater as often as four times a week. ‘I’m interested specifically in dance theater—and in the visuals and lighting and negative space, the costumes. These things influence my thoughts and the presentation of the work in general,” she says.
Inspired by the theater as well, MacCallum frequently incorporates a recording into her works. Johnson reads from his papers in a purposely flat tone, presenting a stark contrast to her ethereal figures. Sometimes discreetly placed fans cause the fabric to rise and fall in ghostly rhythm.
MacCallum’s latest work, Ejection of a Spinning Body from the Solar Nebula, came, she says, from a vivid image she had on reading the phrase in one of her husband’s papers. “The image was of Bob spinning out of control from somewhere in space.
“That image stayed with me and eventually it became clear what I wanted to do. I had mostly been using the printed words from Bob’s papers, black on white, but I had come to realize that the colored diagrams and images representing space were too beautiful to ignore. So I started collecting them and cutting them by necessity into small shapes, mostly circles.”
She then made an enlarged charcoal drawing of the solar nebula approximately 8 x 10 ft. in size. Using wire screening, she cut out shapes from the paper pattern and sewed the colored paper cut outs to each shape before sewing all the pieces together to illustrate the solar nebula.
“Attached to the wall,” she notes, “I used this backdrop as a starting point to think about the body. I wanted the body to hang from above, from a motor, making it spin. And I wanted the body to be both male and female so I made a cast of Bob from the waist up adding details to make him look a little alien.”
The body was made from a plaster cast with roughly ten layers of words torn out of his paper added on top for strength. The body is black and white and the skirt is sewed in individual panels using the bright color illustrations from the backdrop. She designed the skirt, which is Velcroed around the waist, to swirl out. “When lit successfully, the turning body makes a moving shadow on the solar nebula diagram,” she says.
“All the work is a portrait of our marriage,” MacCallum says. “It’s my work. It’s Bob’s work. It’s coming together and making something different.”
— by Elizabeth Meade Howard, Art Editor
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