The name of this crew display, “EX VOTO”—a truncation of the Latin ex voto susceptor—interprets as “from the vow made.” Curated via Lucy Stein and Sarah Hartnett, a duo sometimes called the Mary Ley Line Pilgrimage, the exhibition provides works from thirty fresh artists who proportion an passion in a mundane sense of the divine, fresh ritual, and anachronism.
In 2019, Stein and Hartnett set out from St. Michael’s Mount in Cornwall to adventure alongside the Mary ley line, a path spanning southern England and concluding at Hopton, an unremarkable coastal exurb south of Nice Yarmouth. Guided via goals, accident, and psychoanalytic interpretation, the pair advanced a non-public esoteric symbolism, manifest of their large-scale frottage drawing Retable (all works cited 2023), which depicts St. Catherine laboring on the wheel.
Along this paintings, “EX VOTO” options contributions from fellow “receptive visionaries,” together with Alexa de Ferranti, Keira Fox, Nina Royle, Natalie Dray, and Phoebe Collings James. Their visions enthusiastically embody the quotidian. Able to be worn, Rosie Mullan’s Pool is a slack swath of woven cloth accessorized with ceramic hoops and tags. Cicely Travers’s Bargello is composed of diaphanous silky diamond-pattern underwear that appears find it irresistible will have been shed via a randy harlequin. Steve Claydon’s prosaically titled Mary Magdalen with crimson egg places forth an icon of the biblical heroine cradling an enigmatic orb in the course of a crimson sq..
Through providing those works as votives on public show, the curators deftly invite hypothesis on personal needs and needs. For Stein and Hartnett, who intend to copy their adventure, this can be a generative act. Vows are made and remade; the pilgrimage is rarely finished.
