The Broom

Robert Bibeau takes the poorest object in the house and stands it up as sculpture. The shaft is a whole branch kept in its natural curve, ending on one side in a knot of raw wood and on the other in a dark bundle of fibres bound with jute. The wood is dark, almost black at the tip, a muted tone that belongs to the material itself.

The broom belongs to a long history of images: the witch's instrument, the servant's attribute, a tool of purification in most threshold rites. Nothing here decides between these readings. The object keeps its legible function, you can see that it could sweep, and it is exactly this retained usefulness that makes it unsettling once it leaves the kitchen and stands at human height.

Shown on its own, without figure or staging, the piece holds on its presence as a utensil alone. Nearly two metres of wood and fibre, a rough vertical that illustrates nothing and tells no story. It is a broom, and the displacement is enough to make it strange.