A Little History
by Tess Charnley
'A Little History' tracks a significant period in Jane Hayes Greenwood's life. Emerging from three years of seismic change for the artist, the exhibition explores the coalescence of bereavement, birth, life and death. Comprising two series of paintings and a body of sculptural pieces, the works follow the birth of Hayes Greenwood's two children and the death of her stepfather, examining how loss and gain can co-exist and offering routes through the whiteout of grief.
The exhibition begins with an extension of 'The Witch's Garden' series, an ongoing project that grew out of the artist's extensive research into herbalism, botanical drawings and the symbolism of plants and flowers. Here, the emphasis shifts from the medicinal properties of plants to their anthropomorphic qualities, with Hayes Greenwood interested in the performative nature of flowers. Each small painting depicts a different plant or flower against a psychedelic background. Primula Auriculas shine their stamen's towards the viewer; a mayapple erupts from grey earth and a snowdrop grows out of the unlikeliest of places, a swelling pool of water, its reflection mirrored like a floral Narcissus occupied by the self it never sees. In this painting, 'The Darkest Night', the flower bends in a mourning posture and a single drop of water falls towards the pool, a collection of its own tears.
Each flower in the exhibition holds a significance for Hayes Greenwood. The Primula Auriculas imprinted themselves onto her mind during a trip to a garden centre shortly after her stepfather's death, their clown-like faces emerging in high relief and piercing through grief's white noise. Snowdrops push through snow's blanket with a resilience belying their size and delicacy; mayapples unfurl themselves like newborns uncurling their bodies after months in the womb; and red tulips, vulvic and bodily, present themselves neatly like strangers in their initial bunch and then wind themselves in different directions in the days afterwards, performing their feelings like children. Some references are more ephemeral, the bluebells holding a simultaneous power and fragility even when separated from the magic of their carpeted woods.
This anthropomorphism of the flowers continues across the works, with the painting 'Raw Material' bridging the gap between the two series of paintings and the sculptural works. Here, a tulip grows from a fractured vessel. Torso-like, the vessel is severed down the middle with a clean cut or tear, a breast on either side. There are multiple points of tension in the work, the two sides of the tear yearning to stretch themselves back together, like skin cells fusing, binding and growing anew after trauma. The work recalls both the severance of grief and our capacity for rupture, the visceral nature of our experience uncontainable. Not unlike the Japanese art of Kintsugi, the fragmentation of grief demands psychological work that repairs the fractured self with gold, transforming the person into something similar on the outside but fundamentally changed. Simultaneously, the tulip pushes upwards from within the vessel, burdened by the weight of its own flower and reminding us that grief can be fertile ground for growth.
Ceramic objects are displayed in a vitrine separating the 'Witch's Garden' works from the series of totemic, psychadelic paintings in the second room, simultaneously informing the paintings and imbibing them with a fragility. Hayes Greenwood describes the process of making these sculptures as an instinctive way of 'making sense' of her recent experiences and it is easy to understand why. So often we return to our hands with grief, the last part we hold of the person we have lost. There is an aliveness in the physicality of clay, smooth, wet, and tactile with its earthy smell, that provides an antidote to absence. Its malleability, so susceptible to the movement of our hands, returns a semblance of control.
Urn-like vessels pour, collapse and threaten to topple, plasters pasted on their surfaces to reinforce their strength. In 'A Little History (4)' a clay woman bows with the weight of her five breasts, heavy with milk, referencing the fertility goddess Diana of Ephesus. Fractured limbs balance by a woman's head in 'A Little History (2)', her thick strands of Medusa-like hair concealing her implosion. There is a close link between this sculpture and 'The Contortionist' painting, the sculpture an artefact of the painting's subject after its rupture, or the painting a representation of the sculpture's imminent healing. In 'The Contortionist' the woman's body is whole, bending over backwards to hold a vessel growing out of her pelvis upright, filled with a branch and three tulips, lamenting towards the ground. These works probe how our bodies are no longer our own in pregnancy, childbirth and motherhood, hollowed out to hold and serve another. There is no resentment in the works though, rather they are an ode to the fruitfulness of this act of service, the beauty of nurturing new life. The flowers in the vessels flourish but droop here, Hayes Greenwood's nod to the weight of grief.
The palette is luminous throughout the exhibition, oscillating primarily between blues and pinks, representative of life and the bodily and of loss and mourning. The hallucinatory palette of the paintings' backgrounds combines with an undulating framing around the edges of the works to lead the viewer to feel they are tipping into an otherworldly portal. In some paintings the backgrounds are blended smoothly to create an aurora borealis effect and in others Hayes Greenwood drags pigment down the canvas, Richter-esque in its texture. Surrounded by the juxtaposition of the paintings' high-key palette and the solidity of the maternal vessels, the viewer is both transported and held, the paintings' mothering extending beyond the works.
In Maggie Nelson's seminal book 'The Argonauts', the experience of Nelson giving birth to her much longed for baby Iggy and the death of her partner Harry's mother are recounted in parallel. The accounts of these experiences are visceral and bodily, the pushing and reaching in labour adjacent to the drawn out moments of watching a loved one die, willing them away from pain. Hayes Greenwood's 'A Little History' occupies a similar space. In the works we feel the weight of grief meet with the joy and transformation of motherhood, the two experiences holding each other in a suspended balance. As Nelson asks, "But is there such thing as nothing, as nothingness? I don't know. I know we're still here, who knows for how long, ablaze with our care, its ongoing song."
