Paula Chambers is an artist, academic and arts educator living and working in Yorkshire in the UK. She has exhibited widely including most recently the solo exhibitions Inconvenient Bodies at Hošek Contemporary, Berlin, Working Girls at The Whitaker, Lancashire and Not at Home at the Art House, Wakefield. Paula is Subject Leader for Sculpture on BA(Hons) Fine Art at Leeds Arts University. She has presented at national and international conferences on feminism, contemporary art and the domestic, has chapters included in Feminist Art Activisms and Artivisms, Feminist Visual Activism and the Body, and in An Artist and a Mother. Also journal articles published in the journal of Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society, and in Performance/Research Journal (special issue On The Maternal).

Paula Chambers - A Speculative Proposition for a Feral Artist Intervention

I am an artist who works with materials and objects that can be thought of as feral, the kind of things that have outlived their use value and have entered the economies of second-hand exchange. I subvert and disrupt the overlooked and undervalued material culture of feminine domesticity as a feminist sculptural practice.

On my first visit to Oslo nearly twenty years ago, I bought a small white plastic coffee jug as a gift for my mother. The jug travelled to Cornwall in the UK where it sat unused in a cupboard for many years before being returned to me as an act of accidental regifting. This little jug took its place on a folding table in my studio along with a group of other such domestic objects that had found their way to me from various European cities. A motley crew of abandoned household items I have collected over the years, a pink glass vase I found in a junk shop in Arles, a plastic butter dish from a Brussels flea market, a set of place mats with matching coasters from Porto, a crinoline lady table brush from Naples…

For Momentum 12 I will travel with a set of copper foil sheets that bear the trace or imprint of the nomadic domestic objects that inhabit my home studio. Throughout my time in Moss these conductive objects will loiter in the boundary spaces of roadsides, sidewalks and hedgerows, on the marginal spaces of beachside and urban undergrowth. I will capture these feral interventions through photography, film and text, capturing through documentation these objects’ transient occupation of the liminal spaces of Moss.