- Venue
- Carl Freedman Gallery, Margate
- Location
- South East England
From the moment you pass through the opening gate of hand gestures, a recreation of a 1977 installation by Mary Beth Edelson, the exhibition sets a tone of empowerment. Following this threshold comes a series of rooms marked by hand-painted titles such as Temple of Isis and LaLi’s Niche, with the latter also reflecting the idea of a room within a room, where the painted exterior of Ingrid Berthon-Moine’s interventions becomes a threshold to her delicate watercolours displayed inside. This directness mirrors the raw materiality throughout the show, where poorer processes – such as ink, loosely brushed glazes, and sewn-together collages – challenge traditional material hierarchies, reinforcing the running themes of re-empowerment and reclamation.
Helen Sargeant’s blue ink paintings on paper evoke accidental portraits, with fluid mythic forms emerging from small soaked pieces of paper. Alexis Hunter’s Hormone paintings similarly elevate ink through their dark re-workings of layered demonic forms. In contrast, Morse’s rainbow-colored allegories are left deliberately raw, their unblended brushstrokes weaving across large-scale evocative landscapes. All these primal marks create a sense of immediacy, drawing the viewer into the gallery’s three distinct spaces, each room offering up a new language of reclaimed femininity.
Emma Franks’ repeated Lilith motif – a howling figure borrowed from an ancient incantation bowl – is rendered in varying forms: a scratchy outline, a hastily sewn fabric motif, and a bulgingly pregnant portrait of Lillith herself. The physicality of Franks’ paintings and sewn-together collages challenges you to confront the figures depicted. These raw surfaces eschew polish for something more visceral, integrating materials such as double-sided sewn paintings on raw canvas, and gold-fringed satin hangings originally performative props now reimagined as wall pieces. Her materiality expands the work beyond painting into the personal, echoed in garments hung in front of the works, mythic themes seemingly placed at your fingertips, ready to wear.
Isis Dove-Edwin’s yabba pots further extend the exhibition’s defiant materiality. Their unfinished, abject quality does not suggest vulnerability but rather an attitude of ‘I don’t care’. The clay sags and bulges, creating vessels that both contain and exclude – sealed shut, rejecting their own function. This refusal of utility is a potent statement against expectations of female labour. Like the exhibition overall, they offer up resistance and reimagined feminist futures that do not merely challenge – they empower, offering a new way of seeing not only the art that is included, but of seeing a gallery as a site of radical feminist reinvention.
