ANN CATHRIN NOVEMBER HØIBO

Ann Cathrin November Høibo was born in Kristiansand, Norway in 1979. She lives and works in Kristiansand, Norway.

"Style is a question of wearing one's own skin well. (It was Gertrude Stein who said, writing of the chicness of the French: 'The essence of being civilized is to possess yourself as you are'). In November Høibo's work, however, skins are always being shed or slipped out of - the recurrence of laundry bags is a reminder of how often we change them. The body is depicted through substitutes and stand-ins. (These corporeal cyphers have gradually become more oblique: in an early work, from 2011, a pair of wall-mounted, luminously nacreous sea shells approximated Jean Paul Gaultier's infamous corsetry designs for Madonna; in Notion, 2016, the dirty joke has been sublimated in a series of glossy brown bathroon ceramics). November Høibo's faux leathers and fake furs suggest the treachery of skins, the reality that we are never quite in control of our bodies. Bodies can change, can resist, we can become hostage to them. On many levels, they remain inaccesible to us. Perhaps, in the end, these overwhelmingly tactile works that, in the gallery, we cannot touch, are about hunger for a caress endlessly deferred. Perhaps they are messages in bottles caught among the ocean's swirling mass of plastic debris, circulating endlessly but never to wash up at their intended destination."

Text from Amy Sherlock's "She Sells Sea Shells", in "Textile Tourist", 2017

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