London-based German artist Nicole Wermers was Turner Prize-nominated in 2015 and features in the current Tate Britain hang. Her show ‘Tails & Fainters’, at Herald St’s Museum Street location, features two bodies of work. Up front, her ‘Domestic Tails’ unwind uncannily from hose reels, some tightly coiled as if ready for transport, others stretched out. Further back stands a group of roughly modelled, maquette-sized clay sculptures of women fainting, seemingly collapsing onto the plinths that support them.
PCK: ‘Tails & Fainters’ is a striking title…
NW: I’ve always been interested in contrasting objects as titles – ‘Croissants & Architecture’, one of my previous artist publications, is another example, and I’ve always liked those funny pub names, like ‘Salmon & Ball’ – perhaps because I’m not British. Historically, they were delivering strong images for people who couldn’t read. Equally, I’m interested in the threshold between public and private space, and a ‘public house’ fits in with that. I did wonder whether to put a pub sign outside but decided against it…
Nicole Wermers: Domestic Tail (Ginger), 2025 – Handsewn faux fur tail, polystyrene filling, thread, hose reel. Dimensions variable (20m tail length) Photo by Jack Elliot Edwards
What led you to the tails?
I first had the idea when developing a show for a palais in Moscow that had every room turned into an exhibition space. I liked the idea of sculpture that can be in several places at once. There have been predecessors for sculpture being in more than one room, such as Barry Flanagan’s rope works, for instance, of which I’m a big fan… I observed that in an aristocratic or segregated households, pets are the entities that can circumvent class differences or architectural hierarchies very easily. So the Domestic Tails are fake fur tails coming from the idea of the extended tail of a domestic cat or dog. Their length varies between 10 and 20 metres. They are hand-sewn around a polystyrene filling from Pentonville Rubber (one of my favourite shops), which gives them a certain weight needed to give them the right presence.
So the tails came first?
Yes, and then I looked for what they might fit onto. As the tails don’t end in anything except a hose wheel or cable drum, a ready-made dispenser, there’s this other idea that an alternative infrastructure, as you have for electricity or water, is visibly lying around as opposed to how it is more normally hidden in houses.
And they can be shown in various ways?
It is important that the Domestic Tails have different modes. They can occupy lots of space, or also be shown rolled up as materialised potential space.
Nicole Wermers: ‘Tails & Fainters’, Installation view. Photo by Jack Elliot Edwards
Are you challenging what can be defined as a sculpture?
I don’t kid myself about that, as the expanded field of sculpture has been expanding for a while. But I do see myself as a sculptor, and very much come from the idea of seeing what sculpture can do, and how structural aspects of our surroundings relate to sculpture. The tails don’t end in any bodies and are in some way ‘tail per metre’ – a quantification alluding to both the value or price, but also the potential space the sculptures could extend over. I like the speculative aspect of former and future spaces in the Domestic Tails.
That’s very playful
Yes, I hope so – but nobody is allowed to play with them except me!
Nicole Wermers: Fainter (Fragonard 2), 2025 – Reinforced air dry clay, metal armature, 27 x 47 x 32 cm. Photo by Jack Elliot Edwards
You’ve previously shown ‘Reclining Female’ sculptures of cleaners lying on their cleaning carts. Do the fainters relate to them?
I’m interested in challenging the vertical trajectory of sculpture of the typical male-connotated upright figure. The Reclining Females are about an active female horizontality and making a monument to invisible work. Similarly, I just produced an exhibition at Lismore Castle Arts in Ireland considering the collapsing exhaustion of marathon dancers in the depression-era USA. Fainting is another kind of collapse – and an in-between state, going from being present to not being present.
How did they come about?
It was only after the pandemic that I started to work with figuration, depicting the body directly. The Fainters originated from playing with clay. The idea of the collapsing body is interesting because sometimes the material itself wants to collapse – they are in a fragile stage and look a bit delicate they sometimes appear to collapse into their skirts. They’re wearing voluptuous dresses that verge onto abstraction. The dresses are from a particular era, when it was fashionable for privileged women to distance themselves from the world around them. The scale and weight of the dresses also reduced what they could do physically in their everyday life. Fainting was this ridiculous craze in Victorian times: it became popular as it afforded the fainter a certain aura of fragility, daintiness, primness – ‘Oh my God, there’s a horse carriage!’ or something – it became an over-dramatised fashionable affect. I think this archetype is particularly compelling to revisit at this moment, as the exhaustion experienced by these figures does not stem from something tangible or visible, but rather from forces that are intangible and invisible.
Nicole Wermers: ‘Tails & Fainters’, Installation view. Photo by Jack Elliot Edwards
Do the titles. Such as ‘Fragonard 1’, refer to particular paintings?
I was always fascinated by figures and especially the dresses in paintings by Fragonard, Sargent and others, so I have been looking at historical paintings, but they do not deliberately mimic particular poses.
Have you ever seen anyone faint?
No, I have this idea it happens very rarely. I’ve only seen it in a movie or on stage, when you have this gesture of the hand to the forehead – no one knows where that comes from and no one who faints would do that. I like that theatricality.
And they are fainting, rather than having fainted?
Yes, my figures are in a frozen in-between state, between the vertical and horizontal: diagonal, inclined. I like the idea of the diagonal. I was inspired by Italian philosopher Adriana Cavarero’s book ‘Inclinations: A Critique of Rectitude’, in which she presents a feminist argument: historically, verticality – or uprightness – has been associated with independence, and moral and intellectual superiority. In contrast, horizontality – such as a mother bending over a child or someone lying down in exhaustion or the typical position of the Madonna’s head in Renaissance paintings – carries connotations of care, dependence, and vulnerability. Sculpturally, I also love how Medardo Rosso presents the diagonal in his Bookmaker, but also countless tilted heads, as shown recently in the retrospective at the MUMOK in Vienna (now at the Kunstmuseum Basel).
Nicole Wermers: The Violet Revs, 2016, at Tate Britain. Photo Paul Carey-Kent
‘The Violet Revs’, 2016, is currently on view at Tate Britain. Ten vintage jackets with fox and racoon tails suggest the presence of a woman biker gang operating under the name ‘The Violet Revs’. The installation disrupts expected gender norms while drawing on the 1950’s US myth of men on motorbikes wreaking havoc on small towns, tapping into the fear of the ‘other’ prevalent in post-war US society. How do you see that operating sculpturally?
Most of the works I made before the pandemic imply, rather than depict, the presence of a person, often referencing rituals and structures of the public realm and how these negotiate space in the urban environment. For instance, claiming a piece of public space by temporarily placing one’s jacket on a chair. It was important that the jackets were sewn around them, so that the temporary ritual of placing one’s coat over the backrest in a café or restaurant to mark one’s seat becomes an integral part of the sculpture. The coded appropriation and occupation of public space is now a feature of the object. As with the Domestic Tails in my current Herald St exhibition, the ‘dimensions variable’ of the sculptures is in direct and speculative relation to the spaces the sculptures are shown in.
Nicole Wermers: detail from The Violet Revs, 2016, at Tate Britain. Photo Paul Carey-Kent
Top Photo: Nicole Wermers, somewhat diagonal, in her show ‘Tails & Fainters’ – photo Paul Carey-Kent
Nicole Wermers: ‘Tails & Fainters’ continues at Herald St, 43 Museum St, London, WC1A 1LY to 28 June. All works © Nicole Wermers, courtesy of the artist and Herald St, London.