Material Girls and their Muses

About

This exhibition is a restaging of an exhibition Joseph initially curated in 2014 in a disused space in the diamond district of London’s Hatton Garden. Featuring work by Ludovica Gioscia, Sacha Ingber, Hannah Lim, Cathie Pilkington, Saelia Aparicio, Ovartaci, Heidi Bucher, Mariko Mori, Marion Adnams, Polly Apfelbaum.

Appropriating Madonna’s 1984 theme song in the title, this exhibition interrogates both gender and the meaning of the muse. Muses throughout art history have been characterized as passive, powerless female models at the beck and call of a dominant, influential older male artist. This exhibition turns that romanticised definition of an artist and his muse on its heads: all featured artists identify as female, femme or non-binary, and the exhibition goes back to the ancient Greek origins of the word ‘muse’ when muses were far removed from being submissive feminine objects of desire. In Greek mythology, the Nine Muses were in fact brilliant, accomplished goddesses of the arts, humanities and sciences. These muses had their own agency to influence others. And in this exhibition, the chosen muses – all artists in their own right - serve as active, powerful agents of inspiration for the five featured artists from a younger generation. 

The title of this show may contain the word ‘girls’ and ‘muses’, but these ten artists, regardless of their gender, use materiality, whether it be expressed through bronze, clay, paper, jesmonite, wood, fabric, latex, found objects or their own body, to tell stories powered by their female/femme lived experience. As Aindrea Emelife wrote in her text for the original exhibition in 2014, ‘If these artists were in the pulpit, their muses in the choir, I would totes be at church every Sunday morning’.