Ulterior Altars

Confessions from the Can by Ruby Millichamp

AMY STEWART

There must be few viewers who remain unmoved by Ruby Millichamp’s outsized photographs of claymation-like scenes, familiar and weird as they are. It is difficult to imagine a place as intimate — sacred even — as the bathroom sink. ‘They are common but also incredibly private spaces,’ Millichamp explains when I talk to her. Confessions happen at these ablutionary altars, reckonings too. We stand before them in a rhythm unbroken by the unpredictable particulars of each day. We put on make-up here, we take off make-up here. At the very least, we brush our teeth.

Impressively, these are no Duchampian readymades. Millichamp constructs each scene with a wood-and-cardboard armature that she carefully slathers in papier-mâché and then paints. She says photographing her wobbly constructions ‘legitimises’ them. But it is the intimacy that legitimises them, the evocative omissions, the visceral familiarity. The lumpy surfaces exaggerate the precarity of the polished, inconveniently ergonomic surfaces. The meticulously naive replicas of hygiene products satirise the poreless, plastic branding. And our familiar insistence on balancing our toiletries on the slick porcelain surface only to maddeningly knock them into the sink is almost a Sisyphean allegory. There is much more here than just a sink.

Sinks are revealing, too, especially these: floating, devoid of vanities in more ways than one. The titles for each work are mocking but also almost anthropological. Millichamp quips: ‘there ain’t no hiding when your prescriptions and fungal creams are on display’. In Bachelor a joint stands at attention stage right, while a cigarette teeters dangerously in the foreground. The stage in Bachelor (continued) is bookended by DAX Wax (red, of course) on one side and hair-growth drops on the other. ‘I believe you can tell a lot about a person based on the state of their bathroom sink,’ she continues, ‘It’s sort of freeing to know your most put- together mate isn’t relying on perfect genes alone.’

It is canny, then, to omit the people altogether. There are no mirrors to give viewers a vampiric reveal, and the supermarket-brand toiletries give nothing biographical away. ‘Each scene is an amalgamation of people whose bathrooms I have explored and characterised,’ Millichamp explains. ‘Having the portraits kind of non-specific feels a bit like a personality quiz — find your frame and stand by it.’ These mirrorless fonts are very specifically of here, and more poignant for it. I myself am extremely familiar with just the kind of embossed wallpaper Millichamp renders with paint and wood, each recess on its porous surface a receptacle for a persistent kind of mould unyielding to pre-flat-inspection scrubbing. Though if I am to do this personality quiz honestly, these days I am closer to Forever Young (menopausal) than I am to Girls’ Flat (circa 2000).

Published in issue 190, Winter 2024