Vanessa Baird: I Get Along Without You Very Well

By Beth Williamson, 07.12.2022

Install shot of Vanessa Baird's 'I Get Along Without You Very Well'. Photo: Erin Thomson, courtesy of the Glasgow Women’s Library.

This new series of work by the Norwegian artist Vanessa Baird was made specially for the Glasgow Women’s Library. I Get Along Without You Very Well was initially planned for 2020, but delayed because of the pandemic, and these new works were motivated in part by Baird’s Scottish family and heritage. Baird’s mother, Maureen, was born in Glasgow and this heritage was underlined for the artist by childhood holidays spent in Scotland. Baird’s work is often raw and unflinching, drawing on her Scottish and Scandinavian heritage as well as her own lived experience with her ex-partner who struggled with alcoholism, as well as her care of her ageing mother.

These small fragile watercolour paintings on paper are, in this exhibition, pinned directly to the wall. There is no framing here, save the setting of the library itself. Their focus, however, is in direct contrast to the medium, and it grabs us by the throat. There is nothing subtle about these subjects, nor should there be. There is a brutal honesty in images that appear before us like something from a nightmare, a haunted house, a ghoulish tale.

In one work an armchair takes on anthropomorphic qualities and emerges menacingly from the deep, dark corner of a room. A self-portrait, saggy-skinned and pursed lipped, puts the difficulties of Baird’s personal experiences at the heart of the exhibition. Nothing is ever straightforward when it comes to relationships. In one image composed exclusively of text the artist writes, ‘I get along without you very well of course I do. Except when soft rains fall. And drip from leaves then I recall the thrill of being sheltered in your arms of course I do. But I get along without you very well.’

There are conflicted emotions at play here. The alcoholic in these images is at one and the same time, ogre-like and child-like, in need to care. In another image a tall skinny female figure (Baird) struggles alone to carry the lumbering, passed-out drunken man across her back and shoulders. In other images, the drunken figure metamorphizes into an amorphous mass with just a suggestion of features and limbs. Beside him, Baird is tall, hemmed in by the architecture of their home and relationship. The weight of responsibility and weariness is conveyed through her lowered head, drooping breasts and apron tied around her waist. There is a deep and heavy sadness in this image, as there is in many other works. These are the challenges, trials and responsibilities that many women live with every day. They may or may not be familiar to visitors to the exhibition at the Glasgow Women’s Library. Either way, they convey the crucial need for care and empathy for everyone concerned.

I Get Along Without You Very Well by Vanessa Baird is exhibited at Glasgow Women’s Library until 25 February 2023