"We discussed how certain symbols are repeated across ancient civilisations, often presenting femininity as powerful, subversive, or a bit frightening. Taking these ideas and combining them with our own contemporary perspective offers them a different context and serves to show how the visual arts can reveal archetypes that still relate through thousands of years."
Tristan Hoare is delighted to announce a dialogue exhibition of ceramics and tapestries by London-based artists Christabel MacGreevy and Rafaela de Ascanio, first presented to our audiences in September 2021 as part of our ceramics group show Cracked.
Sexing the Cherry takes its point of departure from Jeanette Winterson’s 1989 postmodernist novel of the same name, which considers women's roles, prominence, or lack of prominence in society within historical fiction. The novel focuses on the Twelve Dancing Princesses from the Brothers Grimm fairy-tale after their reluctant marriages and recounts their murderous revenge on their husbands, up-ending the original fable’s happy-ever-after. MacGreevy and de Ascanio’s joint show provides a chorus of voices in response to questions the novel poses, interweaving figures from ancient to pop cultures, literature, music and film into a multi-disciplinary body of work.
MacGreevy uses a range of techniques and materials to denote both the physical and psychological properties of her sculptural series; terracotta for her figurative vessels, durable and resilient to cracking like her characters themselves; light stoneware and bead glazes fired at high temperatures for wall-mounted medallions based on medieval depictions of plants and strange objects that carry a resonance of magical properties and healing power. The latter works evoke the dichotomy of the woman as witch, the artist as healer, the intertwining of the two. MacGreevy explores a woman's role in society through her relationship to magic and the historical necessity of connecting to supernatural powers, as a means of control. Her graphic appliquéd figures which weave themselves around her curiously shaped vessels hold small clues indicative of a wider narrative, glimpses into the privacy of a life, their own lives, but also every life. “In the same way that Orlando defies gender and time and Hogarth's Rake moves through his chaotic existence,” MacGreevy comments, “the figures on my vessels live out their lives, an expression of freedom, fluidity, and nonconformity.”
De Ascanio’s colourful sculptures and tapestries delve deep into the world of Winterson’s novel, exploring “the tensions within female idolatry, from the monotheist Minoan snake goddess to pop queens Bjork and Rosalía.” Using experimental glazes and lustres, de Ascanio sculpts her own Twelve Dancing Princesses, splicing art historical tropes and symbolism from Renaissance tarot cards, with iconic imagery from the films of Robert Rodriguez, Matteo Garrone, and cult music videos. Her colour palette is tropical (a nod to her early years spent in the Canary Islands) barely concealing heavier themes which emerge; cultural confrontations and females holding positions of dominance, threatening the status quo. De Ascanio’s painting practice finds its way into large-scale tapestries which will adorn the gallery’s walls, woven into life from works on paper which act as sketches for her ceramic sculptures. A beating heart, a double headed bull/cow hybrid, a sphinx and a voluptuous female torso are all but a teaser of the variety of sculptural shapes in which de Ascanio manifests her contemporary princesses.
The artists’ shared love of artefacts and the history and possibility they carry within them allowed the collaboration to blossom. “We discussed how certain symbols are repeated across ancient civilisations, often presenting femininity as powerful, subversive, or a bit frightening. Taking these ideas and combining them with our own contemporary perspective offers them a different context and serves to show how the visual arts can reveal archetypes that still relate through thousands of years.” Sexing the Cherry ties together these strands, allowing the artists’ sculptured characters to move through time and space and assert themselves through violence, persuasion and magnetism. Human, flawed and animalistic, they are deeply likeable and relatable.
Exhibition Response by Dr. Rebecca Birrell
Sexing the Cherry will transform 6 Fitzroy Square into a maze of colour and storytelling, encouraging audiences to explore new and forgotten narratives, recounted by these two young artists in their signature bold and graphic styles.
