Resilience | Inheritance | Out Source | Political Papers
RESILIENCE takes on mythological, historical and contemporary stories of survival and its aftermath, drawing specifically on feminist theory and reappraisals of female iconography. Source materials include historical fables of three sisters or fates, and individual wild women mythologies from ancient Africa, Japan, Greece and Australia.
Works on paper are pre-scored with a knife as a way of acknowledging and activating the paper as a participant in the work. Slices and cuts give reference to skin, to cutting, to injury and self harm. Though it’s incredibly important to me that something else comes of their existence beyond the dumbness (the inability to speak) of injury. And so the focus here is on the Greek mythology of Medusa and her winged siblings Euryale and Stheno. Each piece describes a different story in the womens’ lives as they retreat into hiding and find delight in a landscape of sisterhood that triumphs over trauma.
Three Sisters (This Too Shall Be Washed Away)
2022
acrylic, ink, gouache, watercolour on pre-knife-scored 300gsm paper
42x30cm (A3)
photography ©PYLam