Piercing These Seams
HAND EMBROIDERED TAPESTRY
On view at ‘Pyschic Anemone’ at Cob Gallery, November 18 2021 – January 22, 2022
Work Details:
Piercing These Seams
2021
58x68x4cm framed
Silk hand-embroidery on woven jacquard in walnut
The work draws upon the idea of the ‘bottle’ or container as hero, as detailed in The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction by Ursula K Le Guin. In the essay, Le Guin presents a theory of human evolution drawn from Elizabeth Fisher’s cult feminist text Woman’s Creation: Sexual Evolution and the Shaping of Society that the first human tool was not a weapon but a receptacle, something that made it possible to collect more than could be held in the hands. Taking the form of a teardrop, the works foreground the experience of the body as vessel through collected fragments; hands, hair, the mouth, and the eye.
Cob Gallery is proud to present Psychic Anemone, a group exhibition of mixed-media work by Bea Bonafini, Charlotte Edey and Zoe Williams. These artists are brought to comparison for their multilayered artistic approaches to the transcendental image. Through their powerfully individual languages of symbolism Bonafini, Edey and Williams address similar themes which include the body politic, ritual, magic, gender, mythology, spirituality, eroticism and sensuality.
The works in Psychic Anemone are anchored to a liquidity of form and as such, can be explored through an implication of ‘hydrofeminism’ – a mode of posthuman feminist phenomenology that understands our bodies as fundamentally a part of the natural world, not separate from it or bearing any privileged relation to it.