Broom and blobbers / Broom and brushers

Broom and blobbers / Broom and brushers

The apron has been a key form within Christine Hellyar’s practice since the mid-1980s. Often appearing pinned to the gallery wall, the apron has acted as a ground or vessel for remnants of human habitation—gathered, reproduced and rearranged by the artist.

This particular pair of aprons features humbly-made domestic tools used for removing dirt and mess. As a garment, the apron carries with it associations with domestic labour—often the realm of women—as well as undervalued forms of manual labour, worn by carpenters, foundrymen, fishermen, gardeners, and blacksmiths.

Hellyar has written of the arpon as a kind of “skin,” which acts as an interface between the body and the world. Her composite domestic instruments gesture to the apron as a garment that at once protects its wearer from the mess of the environment around them, while also inscribing the residues of work onto the body.

Among the key reference points for Hellyar’s investigations into the form, the artist cites her grandmother, who “always wore an apron,” as well as a striking image of her father in his gardening apron—which remains pinned to her studio wall. Within these familial reference points, and the sculptural forms that emerge from them, multiple, at times oppositional, meanings spring forth. The domestic worker—the grandmother—both toils and nurtures, sweeps, scrubs and scours dirt away from the home and provides for the continuity and reproduction of life within it, while, at the same time, swallowing the domestic sphere’s dissatisfactions. Indeed, Hellyar wrote of the stoicism of her grandmother. The gardener, for their part, tends to their patch of earth with an attentiveness to the structure of the soil, the rhythms of atmosphere and seasonal change, and the conditions necessary for life to flourish; but, in doing so, applies a human will to a non-human world—pruning plants to guarantee an abundant crop, keeping weeds at bay, eradicating pests.

— Simon Gennard, adapted from wall label for Set Dressing, 2024