Ellen Wetmore and Jeff “Jeffu” Warmouth
Land O’ Lactation
The artists Ellen Wetmore and Jeff “Jeffu” Warmouth are a married couple who recently had a son, Alexander. Shortly after Alexander’s birth, Wetmore remarked that her life was being taken over by her breasts! Land O’ Lactation proceeds directly from the biological experience of new motherhood, and presents a world held hostage by the primal needs of infants. This conflation of the landscape and the body also alludes to the many cultural traditions surrounding the idea of nature as sustainer, like Mother Earth (Gaia), or the Land Flowing with Milk and Honey. The mammary mountains also reflect the human habit of seeing the body in the landscape, and adapting language accordingly: a neck of land, or the brow of a hill. The most pertinent reference is the Grand Tetons, a mountain range in the American West named by a French trapper who saw in the peaks a resemblance to tétons, French slang for “nipples.”
Ellen Wetmore and Jeff “Jeffu” Warmouth are both multi-media artists who share a love of each other, their son, food, humor, and a surreal sense of surprise. Wetmore works primarily with sculpture and video, and is deeply concerned with philosophical and emotional issues surrounding nature, and the body and its functions. Warmouth is an art-world satirist, who gleefully mocks high culture, popular culture, history, science, mass media, the art world, and himself – with any means he can lay his hands on.
Image: Ellen Wetmore and Jeff “Jeffu” Warmouth, Land O’ Lactation, (detail), 2007, Lent by the Artist