Ecdysis

Group show curated by Hannah Rowan at Staffordshire Studios
with works by Emii Alrai, Nora Aurrekoetxea, Charlotte Edey, May Hands, Anousha Payne, Paloma Proudfoot, Hannah Rowan, Eve Tagny.
exhibition text by Anna Souter
Photo credit Rob Harris

Ecdysis

Exoskeleton: a container for a life. Ecdysis: the shedding of an exoskeleton when an invertebrate outgrows it. The arthropod emerges, soft-skinned and pale, expanding furiously in its newfound freedom and vulnerability. Bodily fluids flood to the surface, stretching the skin. Wounds can be healed and even missing limbs can be regrown. Within a few days, the fresh cuticle hardens and turns darker, like the tanning of leather. Interior becomes exterior; the body becomes a vessel to be shed in a new cycle of metamorphosis.

This exhibition explores traces of touch that emerge through materials. Drawing on Ursula K. Le Guin’s ‘carrier bag theory of fiction’ and Karen Barad’s writings on touching and the inhuman, Ecdysis draws together artists working with notions of vessels, ritual, the animacy of matter, and the temporal transformation of materials.

The work of Emii Alrai evokes excavated jars and vases, architectural relics from an uncertain past. Her use of materials plays tricks on the eyes; vessels which from a distance look valuable turn out to be facades or forgeries when seen up close. Alrai challenges how such so-called ‘found’ objects are displayed, interrogating the cultural contexts from which they are taken and into which they emerge as spectacles.

May Hands similarly uses physical containers in both process and outcome. Her installations include consumer detritus and seasonal debris collected by the artist and given a new purpose, speaking both to the cycles of the more-than-human world and to the environmentally unsound rituals and trends of contemporary society. These are combined with ceramic vessels imprinted with the forms of plants and shells, designed to hold small found items and seeds – themselves tiny containers for vegetal life. Hands’ site-responsive installation evokes a sense of ceremony and ritual, with an emphasis on the act of making vessels by hand.

For Anousha Payne, objects are imbued with spiritual potential. In relation to an animist understanding of the living world, she explores whether an object can affect the outcome of future events. Her work suggests a slippery hybridity, an interspecies fluidity captured in the tactile media of ceramics and the discarded skins of reptiles. Payne’s mask-like sculpture draws on the folkloric tale of the ‘snake maiden’ – a hybrid woman with the power to transform objects into living beings.

Spirituality and magic are also central to Charlotte Edey’s practice, which uses tapestry and embroidery to question the limitations of language and the meaningful distances between objects and words. Thread, pearls, and symbolism are woven together to create esoteric, nonverbal narratives that speak to both past and future.

Throughout the exhibition, there is an emphasis on process, on the meeting place between the artist’s hand and the material through actions of weaving, braiding, pressing, casting, and caressing. In Eve Tagny’s video work, rituals are presented as processes for healing. Using the garden as a framing device, the therapeutic gestures of Tagny’s protagonists are anchored in the changing seasons and the rhythms of the more-than-human world. Fossilized landscapes are ‘reignited’ by the holding, stacking, stroking, and discarding of stones; the touch of hand to rock speaks to an intimacy between the bodily and the geological, the personal and the planetary. The video is accompanied by expanded sculptural elements including rubble and raw clay, creating a dialogue with the physical space.

Through her exploration of bodies of water from a hydrofeminist perspective, Hannah Rowan similarly draws together a liquid relationship between the human body and geological systems. Through processes of oxidation, melting, and crystallization, Rowan investigates the ephemerality of materials that change over time. Her new body of work for Ecdysis incorporates casts of the artist’s cupped hands. The gesture suggests a transient attempt to hold water, exploring the idea of rivers as flowing vessels, containers for sediments and memories. A chunk of melting ice drips over the fingers onto a copper plate, responding to the atmospheric conditions of the gallery. Elsewhere glass vessels bear the imprint of gesturing hands or flexed tentacles, temporarily holding the watery potentialities of life.

In Ecdysis, surfaces become sites of metamorphosis, interweaving mythic symbolism with contemporary concerns. Paloma Proudfoot’s work teases out the notion of the body as both fleshly and transient, renewing itself regularly over time. Her ceramic pieces speak to the versions of our bodies that exist in the traces we leave on the world, through our emissions and our discarded cells. Proudfoot’s ceramics are visceral, earthly objects that capture the instability inherent in the ritual of double firing. Gleaming eels are simultaneously inert and lively, writhing round a woven basket that speaks to acts of gathering and foraging, and to Ursula K. Le Guin’s theories of the container as the first human tool.

Nora Aurrekoetxea is concerned with pushing a material to its limits in order to explore the autonomy of materials. Her work attempts to express the openness of meanings inherent within an object. Creating a dialogic tension between functionality and ornament, Aurrekoetxea conceives of the installation as a relational system incorporating the artwork, the viewer’s body, and the architecture of the space.

In ecdysis, the exoskeleton is transformed from an integral part of a living being into an object to be thrown away. The discarded casings repeatedly show up in the fossil record, the more easily preserved in stony form because they are separated from the messy complications of flesh, organs, and fluids. Beneath our feet are the eternally lively traces of lithic vessels, overflowing with layers of meaning.

Anna Souter