EXHIBITION: INTO THE WYLDE: SPIRITUALITY

Into The Wylde: Spirituality

7 November – 21 December 2024
The Williamson Art Gallery and Museum,
Slately Road, Oxton, Birkenhead, CH43 4UE

Adrian Jeans is showing two new works in Into The Wylde: Spirituality, a group exhibition organised by Material Matters, a Liverpool art collective. The show explores Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, a fable that played out on Wirral, and quite likely in the vicinity of The Williamson Art Gallery and Museum.

Portrait sculpting enacts a person’s death by creating an inert replica. It is also magic as it gives formless clay human presence.

Living Head (Wirral) is a portrait of a living person made with Wirral clay, which is being slowly colonised by nature. it reflects upon the Green Knight’s spiritual connection with the land and the colour symbolism in his tale: his verdant, living chapel and his play for the blood of Sir Gawain’s death. In LIving Head (Wirral) a human symbolically dies as they are born of burnt red clay, and then turns green as life returns. A life, however, that is no longer theirs alone; like a knight returning, changed, from a challenge he could not fully meet.

^{Left Image: installation view of Living Head (Wirral)
Right image: Source Vessel. Plaster, wood, rope, steel and cloth}

^{Installation image of Source Vessel}

Suspended by a single rope reminiscent of Lady Bartilak’s green girdle, the spiritual forces of life and death at play in the tale of Sir Gawain also inhabit Source Vessel. Like the damp, green land in which Sir Gawain meets his challenger, this ceremonial vessel drips, slowly, water onto a green cloth, from a metal tip designed to maim and kill and splash the green with the red of his, or our, mortal blood. It is only the green girdle, which was the undoing of Sir Gawain, that keeps this balance in our favour.