A Spirit Inside
The Lightbox, Woking, until 14 January 2024
It’s so gratifying when a gallery you’ve been meaning to visit for ages turns out to have a fantastic exhibition on when you finally make it there.
This is exactly what happened with the Lightbox in Woking. It’s only 30 minutes by train from London, so why haven’t I been before? But the day I finally went the time couldn’t have been more right: the exhibition I ended up at couldn’t have been more damesnet’s cup of tea. A Spirit Inside represents a collaboration between The Women’s Art Collection (based at the University of Cambridge) and The Ingrams Collection, a significant collection of modern British art begun by Chris Ingram in 2002.
There are some big names in this exhibition – Leonora Carrington, Paula Rego and Lubaina Himid to name but three – but also plenty of newcomers. The title of the exhibition comes from a letter from Dora Carrington – who painted the image used to promote the exhibition: actor Iris Tree sitting fearlessly astride a prancing horse. Carrington wrote that she would never marry, because she could not change the ‘spirit inside’ herself.
Featuring 29 works, it’s an eminently manageable exhibition, and the fact that we were the only people there meant we had an uninterrupted view of every picture and artefact, and the chance to cross and recross the room to get another look at whatever took our fancy.
Perhaps the most striking object in the exhibition is Claudia Clare’s Remembering Atefeh (2022), a tall, richly painted and glazed earthenware vase. At first glance, this is an exquisite vase that has been smashed and lovingly repaired, with the broken edges and cracks highlighted in gold leaf. ‘…And then I read the label’, said Mr Juliet (long-standing friend of damesnet, but also my new-minted brother-in-law). Yes, indeed – look through a hole in the vase and you can see a photograph of Iranian 16-year-old Atefeh Sahaaleh, forced into prostitution and then executed in 2004 for ‘crimes against chastity’.
Mr Juliet it was who drew my attention to the fineness (in every sense of the word) of the technique in Gertrude Hermes’ extraordinary The Warrior’s Tomb (1941): a fish’s eye view of the waters closing over a submarine; it looks like a pleasingly amorphous and abstract image until you begin to decode it.
A small Barbara Hepworth stringed curve, a stunning silk square patterned with the most delicate designs created by smouldering incense, a tower featuring women’s disconnected and isolated body parts – everyone will have their own highlights. What is also intriguing about the exhibition is how the artists’ preoccupations have evolved and expanded, moving from the margins to front and centre. Contrast the quiet claim to solitude in Dod Procter’s The Golden Girl (c. 1930) with one of the most recent works: a video installation brazenly challenging the beholder to grapple with the issues of gender identity and stereotyping.
A Spirit Inside is on until 14 January, and could just be an ideal opportunity for some post-Christmas stimulation and reflection.
What an amazing exhibition especially ‘Remembering Atefeh’. Thanks for sharing , Verity.
Thanks! I think I could probably have written twice as much …