Sylvie Fleury and Anthea Hamilton ‘This Feeling of Where Things Should Be’

By Ella Martin-Gachot

Over two and three decades, respectively, Anthea Hamilton and Sylvie Fleury have explored the aesthetic collateral of consumer culture in their artistic practices. Born and raised in London, Hamilton’s uncanny installations and performances probe “the experience of stuff,” as she’s put it in the past. Swiss native Fleury’s fascination with the material fetishes of modern life can be traced back to her earliest readymades in the ‘90s; she’s playfully poked at the art world’s hierarchies ever since.

Here, the two artists—both included in Phaidon’s monumental tome GREAT WOMEN SCULPTORS, out Sept. 24—connect to talk fashion, fantasy, and never wanting to finish.

Sylvie Fleury: I love being called a sculptor because, like many artists today, I don’t sculpt.

Anthea Hamilton: I also don’t sculpt anything: I like to make these lumps I love. I studied painting to learn about two-dimensionality. There were always a lot of sculptors around me, and I thought it was problematic because you would have these big lumps of stuff everywhere. Then I realized that’s what’s amazing about something you call a sculpture: It kind of gets in the way.

Fleury: I didn’t go to art school, but I had a boyfriend who was an artist—he was dealing with readymade and sculpture. It was immediately clear that that’s what I wanted to do: use things that existed... One of my early bronze pieces was [based on] a handbag my mother would put on my knees when she was driving. I always looked at that handbag like, Wow, this thing is so incredible. One day I thought, Oh, I should make a sculpture out of it... I noticed that you did a beautiful campaign with Loewe. 

Hamilton: It’s an ongoing collaboration. Sometimes I would invite them to help me with something, or they would ask me to do something with them. I feel a bit inside of the machinery of it, whereas before, I think I was more like an observer thinking about how fashion functioned, or what a fashion garment was. Can you tell me more about your work with fashion?

Fleury: The first work that I ever exhibited was my shopping bags. It came about because, as I said, at that time I was going out with an artist, and I was following him doing his shows, and I would go shopping then come to the gallery and drop my bags on the floor ... One day, I got invited to do [a show with that concept]. But I had a hard time in the beginning because it was not accepted that you dress very feminine, that you like fashion, that you like to put makeup on or do your hair.  In France, they said I was an anti-feminist artist. In America, I showed the bags for the first time in a group show in ’92. Three weeks later, there was an article in The New York Times with a big picture of my shopping bags, with Roberta Smith writing about “a new kind of feminism.” Suddenly things shifted and people stopped making a fuss about it. Do you also have a relationship like this with fashion?