Rough Sleepers

Rough Sleepers casts a light on one of the most invisible – indeed, scarcely existent – groups of Others. Invisible, because we prefer to look away. The homeless are the measure of our failure as a welfare society; and we do not like to look at failure.

Invited to contribute a work to an exhibition centred on cardboard, the artist searched for cardboard that had borne life – cardboard that had served. It was found it in a large recycling plant: a chaotic, compelling bale of discarded boxes, bound in iron wire and plastic straps.

In that dense bale she saw cardboard dwellings, pillows, blankets. Such a shelter was drawn on one of its sides, scaled as if to human measure. Research into homelessness in Israel led the artist to a governmental report – a dehumanizing, alienated, cold, and denigrating document in which, instead of women and men, there were “females” and “males”; instead of descriptions of distress, lists of “multiple pathologies”; instead of human beings, simply “heads.”

This dreadful report is copied in full upon the flattened surfaces of the cardboard bale. Doing so required months of intimate, painstaking physical closeness to the material – the absolute opposite of looking away.