Castor is proud to present an exhibition of works on paper by Roberta Booth (1947 – 2014).
This marks the gallery’s second exhibition with the Roberta Booth Estate following our 2021 ‘Paintings 1972 – 1982’ which brought together 11 canvases from the formative years of Booth’s career following her graduation from the Royal College of Art in 1972.
A prolific artist and academic, Roberta Booth exhibited widely across the UK and internationally throughout her long career. Her work is held in the public collections of the Victoria and Albert Museum, London; the University of California, USA; Waikato University, New Zealand; Oxford University; Cambridge Universities; Northampton Museum; Herbert Museum, Coventry; Kettles Yard, Cambridge and The Royal College of Art, London.
Booth was fascinated by the machine yet fearful of impending automation of the everyday. 1960 and 70’s science fiction’s portrayal of the future family with flying cars, robot domestic assistance, and labour-free living still remains a political and technological dream, despite AI’s attempted acceleration.
Produced during the 1970s and 80s, the works on show here reflect Booth’s intense interest in ubiquitous objects found in and around the home. Going far beyond proprietary drawings these works on paper demonstrate Booth’s skill for composition and rendering and maintain the same lingering power as her works on canvas.
Under Booth’s unerring gaze, plugs, toasters, household scales and trouser presses are elevated and anthropomorphised. Unlocking a universe from items which were close at hand, she rejects the domestic as inert and banal, instead choosing to imbue these items with their own agency and dominion. In doing so she brings to life her dystopian vision that machines would one day take over.
Using techniques of pareidolia, subversion, juxtaposition and inversions of scale Booth can be seen to emerge from a strong lineage of female surrealists including Dorothea Tanning, Leonora Carrington and Meret Oppenheim. Yet her practice should also be contextualised within the 1970s female conceptualists movement. Her quashing of gendered stereotypes and radical revaluation and reimagining of the domestic sphere and its latent potential for danger can be viewed in the same light as feminist trailblazers including Martha Rosler and Judy Chicago.
The interface between domesticity and landscape is a recurring motif, situating interior objects within nature simultaneously sets them free whilst hinting at something more sinister. ‘Untitled’ (1979) depicts a round tea strainer sat on an undulating landscape of what looks like coffee beans, drawn at scale it's not a stretch to see the metallic sphere and chain as a mine washed ashore. By changing the context of how the subject is seen these usually recognisable objects inherit a power and weight of potential above their designed use.
Sitting here in 2023 with smart home and a heavy reliance on automation it’s not hard to see Booth’s foreshadowing begin to come into ever sharper focus.