Maternal Loss, Transitional Space and the Uncanny in Alison Marchant's Kingsland Road, London—East

Abstract

In Alison Marchant's Kingsland Road, London—East, the artist hung her mother's petticoat on an old washing line in a basement of a derelict house in London's East End. The work existed as a temporary site-specific artwork and as a photographic work exhibited in the Photographer's Gallery, London, as part of the Exhibition Invisible Cities.Drawing from Michel de Certeau's concept of the walker as an enunciator of meaning and from Walter Benjamin's concept of the dialectical and fragmentary, this paper investigates the possible meanings of the work. It investigates meditations on the maternal loss that it evokes and draws on Winnicott's theory of transitional space and Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger's concept of matrixial space and her redefinition of the uncanny. As a metaphor for the female body/ prostitute/hysteric, the petticoat can also be considered as a female flâneur and a disrupter of space—an anarchic figure, eroding the constructed “natural” association between women and the home. The petticoat as an objet a, a residue and sign for the uncanny, becomes a figure of lack signifying the repression of the maternal and evoking a sense of unease where the viewer uncannily experiences a sense of his or her own disappearance.