Immersion: Judy Chicago, Feather Room (1966)

Feather Room was created by Judy Chicago with Lloyd Hamrol and Eric Orr. The three loosely formed “The Rooms Company,” the group’s name being a nod to the artists’ wish to create room-sized environments. After the geometrical structures and smooth surfaces of Chicago’s earlier output, Feather Room proves a key work in the artist’s career and represents a transition towards a series of pieces that are environmental in the strict sense of the term. She called them Atmospheres and the new pieces offered experiences that were more for the senses and less concrete. By modifying the atmosphere of an artwork, Chicago hoped to feminize a patriarchal world. Feather Room presents a diffuse, shifting esthetic with a light organic art material that presents a clear contrast with the hard materials and sharp-cornered shapes of minimalist sculpture she had focused on to that point. Angles no longer jut out and pictorial planes are no longer neatly arranged. The lines of the architecture are softened and blurred, offering the space a dilated look, an effect that is reinforced by the uniform diffuse lighting. For the artist, the immersive scale is important for its strong impact on visitors, who find themselves enveloped in light and feathers.

An installation presented as part of the exhibition
Immersion. The Origins: 1949-1969
Musée cantonal des Beaux-Arts de Lausanne, 4.11.2023-3.3.2024