Highlights

The Creation of the World, 2019 by Lauren McLaughlin

Neon and transformers.

‘The Creation of the World’ is a wall-based neon artwork depicting a pregnant figure at the moment of crowning; the blue-gloved hands of the midwife ready to support the emerging baby. The composition and the artwork title make reference to Gustave Courbet's 'L'Origine du monde (The Origin of the World) [1866] and Michelangelo's 'The Creation of Adam' [1512].

The patriarchal and western religious narratives surrounding the female body, motherhood and the creation of life that have dominated art history, continue to impact the cultural representations of pregnancy and motherhood today.  Having previously worked with neon to explore my own experience of maternal identity through language, I was  interested in utilising the unique properties of neon to explore representations of the birthing body, with a view of creating an empowering representation of birth which challenged these limiting representations. Neon is historically associated with the advertisement of the female nude as sex object. By using the medium to illustrate images of birth, the work aims to provoke a dialogue around the reasons why we are so comfortable with the sexualised body but so shocked at the birthing body. Drawing upon conceptual themes within the “Madonna/Whore” dichotomy and the depictions of the female body as either “sexual” or  “maternal”, it aims to blur the boundaries between these two tropes and create a message of empowerment, strength and multifaceted maternal power.

Produced during a residency at Birth Rites Collection with funding from Creative Scotland, The Hope Scott Trust and King’s College Cultural Institute.

65 x 65cm

Liquid Notation, 2024 by Claire Barber

I came across a weave notation book created as a student, that had become water-damaged. The dampness on the weave notation informed a new abstract(ed) visual form stimulated by the intersection of the fragile memory of the original weave notation, the technique of weave, and the damaged artefact.

125.5 x 61 cm

Untitled, 2025 by James William Murray

copper grease on paper

20 x 16 cm

Natural Frequencies, 2025 by Tracy Hill

This is part of a new installation being developed for exhibition in the summer.  A 2 meter hand-cut panel of Kozo paper carries the rhythms of energy and movement in response to field recordings captured at Clerkenwell in Islington.  Hydrophones captured the unheard sound of the city from within the ground water which runs silently and invisibly below the streets of Islington.

200 x 90 cm