A group exhibition with new work by
Plum Cloutman
Vanessa Garwood
Lisa-Marie Harris
Serena Korda
Anna Perach
Ebun Sodipo
Private view 30th January 6:30-8:30pm
In ‘Fractured Venus’ six artists interrogate stereotypes of femininity and observe the slippages between these conventions and their own stories. The exhibition is a testament to the kaleidoscopic breadth of female experience; it makes no attempt to pigeonhole what it means to be ‘female’ but instead grapples with the joyous, painful, messy and mundane multitude this word contains. The title is taken from a Sylvia Plath poem ‘Two Lovers and a Beachcomber by the Real Sea.’ The full line reads ‘probing fractured Venus with a stick’; Venus, the Botticellian epitome of femininity, with her idealised form and latent modesty. The exhibition seeks to break down this caricature and probe the resulting fragments; to reveal an authentic femininity untethered to patriarchal convention.
In ‘Merry Maidens’ Vanessa Garwood depicts six women in a moment of abandoned dance. The figures appear to be subject to a centrifugal force that thrusts them to the edges of the canvas while they cling, laughing, together. Titled after the Cornish legend in which nineteen women are turned to stone for their irreverent dancing on a Sunday, the ‘maidens’ pay homage to generations of defiant female friendships. The painting has a timeless quality, enhanced by the monochrome application of paint and yet belied by the familiar silhouettes of a twenty first century wardrobe. The women appear to dance for themselves and for each other. If there is a male gaze then it can only watch from the periphery, there is no room for it to participate amongst this cavorting coven. In Garwood’s words ‘there is a joy and abandon, a search for hedonism, a recklessness, also a particular kind of hilarity that comes out when women are alone with each other. Along with this strength, connection and unity there is also a real rage and fear.’
Ebun Sodipo’s practice also often pays homage to sisterhood. In her Goldsmiths CCA exhibition, she spoke of the ‘sisters, trans women and trans femme people, who have sustained my existence and enable other trans people’s existences.’ The two assemblages included in ‘Fractured Venus’ utilize an archive of images mined from the internet to create haunting visual poems. As part of a broader practice of critical fabulation the works interrogate the very act of autobiography, accessing and fabricating a personal and collective narrative of trans femininity. ‘when you dream’ conjures an idea of leaping from an apocalyptic past into an, as yet, unrealised future. The work is paired with ‘The Art of Autobiography’ in which a fragment of dislocated text reads ‘so let’s start there’. Sodipo’s work subverts traditional notions of race and gender; creating a space in which trans histories are reclaimed, the present is acknowledged, and a speculative and euphoric trans future imagined.
Both Garwood and Sodipo use their own lives and bodies as a point of artistic genesis. The same holds true of Serena Korda’s Wild Apples series which recently showed institutionally at East Quay in Watchet. Sculpted from life using her own body and models local to East Quay the works depict women with menopausal or post-menopausal bodies; non-idealised individuals each showing the physical traces of a life lived. Historically those in this middle to late stage of womanhood have been derided as witches, hags or crones. The series shuns this reading, instead channelling the power and wisdom inherent to the elder wild woman of ancient myth. The ceramic bodies are shown dissected, their backs flayed, their organs revealed or proffered forth like fruit. As such they probe the lack of understanding and female body shaming prevalent in medical institutions, walking a visual tightrope between highly individual portraiture and the clinical remove of the anatomical model.
Entirely different in medium and execution Korda’s work is linked to that of Anna Perach across the historical expanse of the dissecting table. Referencing her recent institutional exhibition ‘Holes’ at Gasworks (watercolour studies for which are included in the exhibition), Perach presents two puppets; tiny, hand-embroidered versions of her larger tufted figures. The sculptures have the intimacy of having been worked by hand, the perpetual ‘wounding’ and ‘healing’ for which sewing is a metaphor. Like Korda, Perach addresses the scientific context by which female bodies have been interrogated historically; both artists referencing 17th century anatomical Venus sculptures in which the female interior was (literally) dissected to form a patriarchal understanding of femininity. The scale of the puppets gives them an increased potency. Pierced by the spikes that support them, and punctured, in the case of Puppet II, by a tongue that erupts from the figures belly, both sculptures play with the language of violence and subjugation. They are however also puppets without strings; non-conforming and subjugated bodies that announce their own autonomy and exude a talismanic strength.
The two wall-based reliefs of leather on raw linen handsewn by Lisa-Marie Harris also address female interiority. The artist invokes the ovoid eyes and slit-like, "dead expressions" often seen in ancient, female-leaning fertility objects across various cultures, including those left behind by the First Peoples of Trinidad & Tobago where she was born. The deadpan façade of these ancient female representations is one she sees mirrored in the guarded, contemporary gaze of a fellow mother in the playground, or an unknown woman passed in the street. Her symmetric, intricately crafted geometric pieces are themselves an act of masking. The tension of the pierced leather skin and taut forms implies a disparate narrative beneath; what she describes as ‘the Rorshach-like quality of each work, dread and uncanny flashes of boredom, resentment, rage, hopelessness, despair - and pleasure - are just barely visible on the surface’. The tension lies in the fragile skein that separates this broiling interior from the sleek and often impassive public presentation of self.
In Plum Cloutman’s work the miniature scale of the canvases and the laboured application of the paint often combine to create a feeling of domestic claustrophobia. Like a dolls house with its doors open to reveal the private honeycomb within, or a log rapidly lifted to reveal the secret myriad bug life beneath, there is a feeling of both surprise and unexpected voyeurism. The mundane subject matter enhances the worrying feeling that everything is off kilter, of unexplained relationships and underlying power asymmetries. Inspired by the atmosphere of Iris Murdoch’s novels, their dark humour and complex human relationships, a sense of stage-trickery is ever present. In the words of Murdoch “We live in a fantasy world, a world of illusion. The great task in life is to find reality." In their own, entirely different ways, this goal holds true for all the artists included in this exhibition.