Shrugging Offing – review

Shrugging Offing: Lucy Clout's video installation

Lucy Clout’s solo exhibition is a 14 minute single channel video that plays on a loop in the cool, underground, concrete space of the Limoncello gallery. Shrugging Offing discusses intimacy, sexuality and comfort on the surfaces of the female body and is, the artist claims, “a work about maintenance.”

We see bright, flimsy cardigans hanging in an otherwise drab clothing factory, limbs used as lifeless props and the sound and occasional sight of boils and spots being squeezed while women shriek and men laugh with disgust.

We hear faint whisperings which, once you focus and listen, turn out to be a softly-spoken woman giving a dermatology consultation.

These gentle whisperings are actually taken directly from YouTube, from a popular video made for the ASMR community. ASMR (Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response) is a relatively recent internet craze in which video makers, often quietly attractive young women, role-play situations such as make-up tutorials or pretending to cut the viewer’s hair.

The effect is designed to be calming and is a popular technique for insomniacs, inducing the feeling of someone playing with your hair or drawing on your arm.

Cutting through this whispered monologue we hear shrieks familiar to anyone who has found themselves straying across into Youtube’s more revolting offerings and, with morbid fascination, watching videos that promise enormous spots being squeezed and boils being lanced.

Occasionally we see these eruptions, but cut onto screen like a moving collage, so we only have a glimpse of a red, swollen boil, or pus oozing through broken skin.

There is something deeply compelling in being offered these little details but never the full picture – we focus on pasty white dancing legs, but the dancer remains unseen, adding a raw vulnerability and a detached intimacy to the piece.

Take your time at Shrugging Offing, it’s well worth watching through a few times, enjoying the calmness of the space and really listening in order to come away with your own reading of the exhibition.

A Conversation with Lucy Clout on 6 April is also sure to spark some very interesting debate and offer a different perspective.

Shrugging Offing
6–20 April
Thursday – Saturday 11am-6pm and by appointment
Limoncello
340-344 Kingsland Road
E8 4DA