Running with the Wolves
Carolina Aguirre, Camilla Bliss, Rafaella Lazarou, Simona Orentaitė, Salomé Wu, Georg Wilson
16th February - 19th March 2022
Running with the Wolves is a group show featuring six contemporary artists whose work explores mythology, folklores, fairy tales and the spiritual through painting, drawing and sculpture. The exhibition takes its title from the book Women Who Run with the Wolves, Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype (1992). This fascinating book by Clarissa Pinkola Estés, a Jungian analyst, author and poet offers a prism through which to explore the work of six artists incorporating myths, fairy tales, the spiritual and folklore into their practice with relevance to contemporary experience.
Georg Wilson and Camilla Bliss use the mediums of painting and sculpture to illuminate how ancient ideas of ritual and symbolism can have fresh relevance for audiences today. Camilla Bliss’s practice incorporates motifs found in myth and folklore through a wide range of materials, including glass, plaster, clay, and bronze. Her work is imbued with a surprising combination of sentimentality, spirituality and a playfulness that creates an engaging and affective experience of viewing. Georg Wilson transforms the canvas into a magical realm, full of wild, goblin-like creatures reimagined from English folklore. Her work within the exhibition is inspired by the ancient pagan festival ‘Samhain’, when the veil between the worlds of the living and the dead was permeable allowing interaction between humans and those of the spirit world.
Salomé Wu, Carolina Aguirre, and Simona Orentaitė paint intuitively, incorporating symbols, personal experience, and dreams into deeply absorbing works. Salomé Wu’s expressive figurative paintings play on an emotional tension between joy and melancholy, reality, and the unseen to unveil hidden narratives. Carolina Aguirre’s intuitive method of painting inscribes each mark and brushstroke with a potent sense of emotion and feeling, drawn from a deeply personal mediation of female experience. The layered paintings of Simona Orentaitė contain a diaphanous quality - achieved by her unique method of starting the painting process with watercolour before building layers with oils. Each work represents a process of discovery, with this magical thrill of uncovering hidden forms and figures passed on to the viewer.
Multi-disciplinary artist Rafaella Lazarou’s intricate and fluid drawings depict anthropomorphic and biomorphic forms filtered from myths and fairy tales. These shapeshifting creatures occupy a liminal position between form and formlessness. Expressed in their chosen medium of coloured pencil drawing on coloured paper, lime greens, deep blues and bright violets work in harmony to create a lyrical quality and imbue a sense of playfulness in their work.
The artists selected each bring their own unique voice and practice to the exhibition, demonstrating an attentiveness to their inner selves, as well as an awareness of the wisdom that can be found within myths, folklore, and fairy tales. Their work provides fertile ground to enable viewers to gain the same insight, encouraging a slow process of looking and feeling. It is our hope that in bringing together this critically important feminist text with current conversations around femininity, myths and folklore as expressed in art, Running with the Wolves will create a fresh and exciting space to engage with both the book and works of art on display.
