Ongoing Rhubarb Project. Yorkshire Sculpture Park 2020

Every year for many years Daudy would travel up to Wakefield in Yorkshire to listen to the forced rhubarb growing in the dark at Oldroyd’s Rhubarb Farm.

The experience of listening to the rhubarb pop and grow in the vast overheated barns has informed her view of our relationship with nature and also of our relationship to authority and government.

Daudy’s self portrait was composed of herself as a rhubarb, surrounded with ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs which she learned at Oxford with a PhD student during her extensive time researching for the Saatchi Tutankhamun show.

The work is composed of crochet leaves made by women in Syria thanks to the organisation of Daudy’s friend Itab Azzam and Makani. The felt comes from Johanna Daimler + Daughter who make felt in Munich since the late 19th century including for NASA, the felt suits and blankets of Joseph Beuys.

Joseph Beuys is well known for his use of felt in many of his major documented works such as the iconic Felt Suit (please see link to this work at the Tate and audio essay from MOMA) and his performance art involving a coyote.

His use of materials like felt and fat was central to his personal mythology, which included a story of being rescued by Tatars who wrapped him in these materials after a wartime plane crash in the Crimea.

Daudy’s use of felt stems from her love of its childish games, as well as an idea of redemption and hope she finds in the idea of the sweepings of the wool industry being recomposed into a new material from which things can be made, or in her case cut.

Her  work on subjects of home and identity echo with those of Beuys see for example the felt cape from which he insulates himself from the outside world/coyote in I Like America and America Likes Me

Rhubarb Popping Sound

E Oldroyd Rhubarbhttps://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/beuys-felt-suit-ar00092

Yorkshire Sculpture Park

https://www.harrassowitz-verlag.de/Sleep_Beds_and_Death_in_Ancient_Egypt/titel_8558.ahtml

https://www.moma.org/audio/playlist/229/2945

https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/beuys-felt-suit-ar00092