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Bathroom Singers (2025) by Megan Hadfield (1994) consists of three graphic works and two sculptures. Filled with rhythmical texts, the graphic works resemble musical scores or concrete poetry (poetry that emphasizes the typographical elements and sound). They are based on poems describing an eerie landscape. The sculptures are aluminium facsimiles of shower trays, with the shower drains surrounded by cartoon-like images representing various types of junk, including a fishtail, some indefinable gunge, and a skull.
Hadfield took inspiration from a legend about the flooded lands of Saeftinghe, a salt marsh area on the Dutch-Belgian border. According to this folktale the medieval villages that once stood there were flooded when a sea creature cursed the inhabitants as punishment for their greed. Some contemporary visitors to the area claim that, on foggy days, they can still see the ghostly appearances of the drowned Saeftinghers. This legend is not only told locally, but in 2000 also became the subject of a Suske en Wiske story. The images on the shower trays were taken from this comic book.
Hadfield is interested in the relationship between people and landscapes, and the impact (folk) narratives have on this relationship. She noticed a parallel between the underlying themes in the Saeftinghe story – i.e. the sea creature’s flood curse, and human greed and excesses – and our current relationship with the landscape. In Hadfield’s sculptures the legend is projected onto an everyday bathroom object, thereby bringing the ghostly landscape closer to home. She also inverted the story, as it were. Instead of a flood, the water has flushed down the drain, only to leave manmade waste behind.
Text: Sarah van Binsbergen
Translated from Dutch by Marie Louise Schoondergang (The Art of Translation)