S S S in the Garden is an installation consisting of clay, painted fabric, and padding, formally alluding to “draught snakes”—the cushions placed under windows and doors to block draughts, popular in the mid-20th century, and made from scraps of fabric stuffed with grain. The symbolic silhouettes of snakes, painted in abstract patterns and spots, stuffed with rustling filling, whose clay heads with individualized features seem to smile or talk to one another, embody complex connotations. Rooney deliberately juxtaposes the sensuality of an animal that is supposedly hostile to man with a product of feminine homemaking. The work’s laconic, poetic title, with its universally comprehensible onomatopoeia, further underscores the ambiguous interplay between anxiety and humor, and between the natural and the human-controlled.

Despite the fact that in Western Christianity the motif of the snake is associated primarily with sin and evil, snakes are also a symbol of wisdom, fertility, strength, immortality, and eternal renewal. From classical, biblical motifs of the temptation of Eve and expulsion from Eden, through decorative depictions in applied arts and jewelry, to contemporary interpretations in the visual arts, the ubiquity of the serpent motif confirms a human fascination with this curious animal.

The installation S S S in the Garden highlights a specific narrativity present in Rooney’s seemingly abstract oeuvre. The artist often uses wordplay and misappropriations, alluding to the most common meanings of words, items associated with domestic spaces and the sphere of everyday life, as well as personal, bodily experiences through which emotions, fears, traumas, and memories are accumulated and expressed.

[K.C.-A.]