Linear Installation Artist

Born in Newcastle upon Tyne in 1938, Pip Culbert attended the Royal College of Art in London from 1957-61. She has gone on to exhibit her unique linear work of deconstructed forms, emptied shapes and geometric minimalism all over the world, including Australia, New Zealand, the USA, the UK, Japan, Germany and France. Pip has now chosen to settle in Croagnes in the South of France.

Pip Culbert’s deconstructions of loose covers, clothes, tents, parachutes, bags, pockets and handkerchiefs are of found objects; all the cloth is cut away leaving the seams, hems and labels. The seams are pinned to the wall as isometric line drawings or the seams of clothes are hung on wire hangers as low relief sculpture, recreating the source in outline with memory of the use of the found object.

There is an inter-play of geometry, history and memory; the pieces are instantly recognisable for what they are. Her work is at times breathtaking, commenting on the human condition and highlighting the melancholy of the remains of humanity.

Reviewing Pip’s exhibition at SoFA in 2004, Roger Boyce writing in “Art in America” comments that “aside from the optical and illusionary delight that they provide, Culbert’s wares give rise to historical recollection. Tents, awnings, trunks and cushions bring to mind nomadic accommodations, expeditions, hunting camps, celebrations and feasts. Culbert removes the “flesh” of these culturally rich objects, reassembling their structural “skeletons” into study mounts, like the pedagogic reconstructions found in natural displays. In doing so, she privileges conceptual speculation over physical utility – in effect sacrificing the corporeal life of her goods for their ideational potential”. 

Another aspect of Pip’s work is a series of moving photographs of garments found abandoned as well as creating a specific series such as the “Dressed Chairs” which she places in natural surroundings, expounding us with an intense characterisation of these garments adorning the chairs. These photographs are reproduced and made available as limited edition prints.

In this current collection, Pip presents us with a variety of pieces that play upon the main themes of her work, that of humanity stripped down to its core elements of emotion and function laid bare. Her work is a celebration of perception in the negative, a fascination with emptied-out shapes that invert the viewer’s perception of reality. “Shredded Shirt, Sir”, is a playful piece that makes a powerful statement on the modern working environment, whilst ‘Shoulder Bag’ passes comment on the hollow and ephemeral nature of fashion. “If we consider that inversion is the art of playing with paradoxes, the work of Pip Culbert is a perfect example of this,” says critic Patricia Brignone. “Her ghostly shapes, emptied of their contents and beautifully presented, release the silent presence of the garment and a body in the negative. This upsets established limits and liberates subjective inventions, throwing down a challenge to the tamed strangeness of the world.”

Over the years, Pip’s work has gained international attention, and her unique pieces have featured in many significant exhibitions and their catalogues, including ‘Software’ in France, Linen Line, at the Sofa Gallery Christchurch in New Zealand, ‘The Secret Life of Clothes, Artium Fukuoka in Japan and a commission for Allianz, in Berlin, a permanent installation of Seams, which runs the length 750 meters of a corridor.

The lengthy discourse often dedicated to her work highlights the distinctive nature of a practice that demands further analysis. “Pip Culbert’s lesson to us is that less is more,” says Patricia Brignone. “Although sharing with the minimalists the same taste for the essential, as presented by unencumbered simple forms, Pip’s work, so full of humour and poetry, has very little in common with modernist reduction as practised by the exponents of ‘cool’ art”. Her work shows an attraction to the hidden side of things, deconstructing reality to shed light on that which is usually ignored.