TO BE SEEN
19.01.23 - 23.02.23
Sarah Baker, Marilyn Hallam, Alison Jones, Irini Karayannopoulou, Andi Magenheimer, Hannah Murgatroyd, India Nielsen, Rebecca Parkin, Kate Street, Zoe Francis Spowage and Milly Thompson
An archetype is a communally recognized form that dwells within our universal consciousness - a recurrent symbol in our popular culture arising from a shared mental landscape. Jung argued that they are informed and created by our common need to organize and define ourselves as human beings.
Their continued relevance would suggest that ancient patterns are repeated eternally, century after century. Although each generation has the illusion that they are transformed into something other, something more thoughtful or progressive, away from the animal and closer to the machine, perhaps the old things that define us are unavoidable. It's both terrifying and comforting.
But femininity is layered and complex, and female archetypes seem to reverse this complexity and limit a woman's personality into one, basic role - mother, lover, fighter. But how can a woman become a Mother without becoming a Lover first, and wouldn't a Mother become a Fighter if her child was in danger? How many roles and blueprints do we exercise throughout our lives and how can we escape the externalisation of this labeling that can limit us to repeated patterns that take us no where but in vicious circles? Can women (and men) escape these predestined routes and indulge in the complexity of being? The artists here make work that explore contemporary revisions on familiar feminine paradigms.
Milly Thompson, Scuba Sauvage Poseidon, Ink, acrylic, gouache and watercolour on vintage linen, 150 x 100cm
There are works which underline the everlasting motif of subjectified women while reflecting on contemporary society’s expectation of perfection and the ideal. There are images of women of a particular social class who are also part of a system of representation in magazine images and high life blogs. In the clothes and shoes these women wear, they exemplify sexist assumptions that are found in different ways across the entire social structure. They remind us that sexualised images are still at the apex of a wider structure of exchanges and that the immediate circle of people around know this, and don't appear to care. There is a familiar commodification of the female body, but explored through a combination of images and objects that refocus the issue.
Sarah Baker, Lost Body, 2023, Vintage magazine collage, 34 x 22cm
Daryl Hannah’s iconic performance as a mermaid in the 1984 romantic comedy ‘Splash’ provides pop cultural inspiration for a series in which the hybrid and mesmeric ‘merwoman’ is centralized as the principal figure and agent of nature. The frothy femme fatale emerges from the foaming waves and eyes us knowingly. Here there are also women questing, enduring and, expanding into the voyage of motherhood; women who aren’t on show for any man’s benefit; women without men, revelling in their own curves and sensual potential. Cowgirls and performers shakily seize back control and middle-aged women, ageing well, are not invisible, but behaving badly - or at least are demanding to be seen.
Text written in collaboration.
Hannah Murgatroyd, Kyrie Eleison, 2020, Silverpoint & pencil on paper, 76 x 56cm
Marilyn Hallam, Two Sycamores Two Cars, 1996-2000, Oil on canvas, 122 x 84cm
In memory of Milly Thompson - a much loved artist, teacher and friend.