Rafaela De Ascanio + Christabel Macgreevy | Sexing the Cherry

About

De Ascanio's paintings and ceramics playfully reimagine art historical tropes, symbolism from Renaissance tarot cards, landscapes from mythological painting, and compositions from Egyptian friezes. Appropriating the reverence of canonical imagery, de Ascanio paints stories depicting her contemporaries, reimagining ancient narratives with female protagonists. While these characters are portraits of artists and performers, their deification as female warriors, witches and goddesses imbue them with individual talismanic powers from creation and fecundity to strength and rebirth.

Macgreevy is best known for a bold drawing practice with an emphasis on pattern, colour and graphic lines lending itself to an expanded practice which includes collage, printmaking, textiles and more recently, sculpture. Macgreevy’s works explore ideas of memory, identity and the human inclination to transform the significance of the inanimate, or overlooked object into a personal shrine. She is concerned with myth, love, and memory explored through folklore, art history and personal mythology. Storytelling and an idiosyncratic iconography are used to express what we may struggle to describe in words: identity, masculinity, femininity. Drawing every day, she uses the primitivity of mark making as the simplest means of self expression. 

The title of the exhibition takes its name from Jeanette Winterson’s 1989 postmodernist novel, which considers women's role, prominence, or lack of prominence in society within historical fiction. Sexing the Cherry serves as a thematic starting point for the topics that de Ascaio and Macgreevy explore in their practices.