Wermers’ Tails & Fainters subverts sculpture’s traditions with sprawling fur coils and fainting clay figures, wryly probing class, access and the hierarchies embedded in domestic space.
Nicole Wermers’ Tails & Fainters lets fur spill like privilege across floors, clay ladies swoon like thwarted ambition, and all of it laughs at sculpture’s stiff decorum.
In Domestic Tails, handmade pelts—ginger, black-tipped—unspool from hardware-store reels, their lengths (17m, 20m) slinking over marble and parquet. They’re sly infiltrators, threading through class-bound rooms like cats in a palais. Fainters, though, freeze-frame the female form in freefall, their clay dresses arrested mid-flounce.
The gallery, once an antiquities shop, becomes a stage for Wermers’ gags about access: who gets to linger, who’s barred, and which bodies (artists? terriers?) slip the rules. Even the title winks—pub signs for an illiterate era, now repurposed for our age of coded exclusion.
Her materials tell their own jokes: air-dry fragility vs. industrial reels, laborious stitching vs. “sculpture per meter.” Nothing’s fixed, least of all the hierarchies we tiptoe around daily.