Tilt Shift: Shadows of the Seasoned Sun
Southwark Park Galleries, 2022
Tilt Shift: Shadows of the Seasoned Sun reflected on the configuration of gardens as mythical encounters between nature and artifice. Through a procession of four large-scale carnivalesque sculptures, the work channeled and challenged the enduring female archetypes of maiden, mother, crone embedded in garden mythology. Fountains and follies become absurd machines and symbolic forms, each sculpture embodying a different facet of feminine mythology, from fertility and evolution to enchantment and desire.
Liquid Heart was a fountain envisioned as the 'maiden’, weaving together imagery of water, matrilineal inheritance, and evolutionary memory. Along the Milky Way explored the 'mother' in an enclosed garden reflecting on the pressure for abundance and the mythology symbol of milk as stars. Echo Chamber embodied the 'crone' through the figure of the bat death goddess, drawing on her associations with enchantment, witchcraft, and fear. Often misunderstood or maligned, like the crone herself, the bat is both a symbol of transformation and a vital ecological presence in the garden. The final sculpture, The Botany Lesson features a single pointing finger directed at pelvic bone, from which a swan’s head emerges. The work was shaped by an imagined exchange between an older and younger woman, one passing on knowledge about the body, reproduction, and the importance of self determination and desire beyond fertility. The swan, referencing the myth of Leda and the Swan is a complex symbol of desire, power and vulnerability.