“La Mariposa is every woman; she is Mother Earth, Pachamama and Gaia, she is the rivers and the seas, she is intuition and magic, she nurtures, destroys and creates life all at once. She doesn’t conform to modern, White, Western ideas of beauty. She is of the earth, the water and the sky. She encompasses the entire cosmos, and her hips are wide enough to birth all the life in the Universe.” With these beautiful words, curator Becca Pelly-Fry introduces us to La Mariposa (The Butterfly Woman), a group show hosted by London’s Soho Revue gallery until the 15th of March.
Bringing together twelve different artists, the idea behind the group show was inspired by the novel Women Who Run With The Wolves (2008), by author Clarissa Pinkola Estes. “I was captivated by this story as it spoke to me of female power, and how it exists in the everyday,” the curator shares. Hence, she wanted to recreate this feeling somehow by putting together an exhibition with artworks that spoke of the divine feminine. “Through re-imagining mythological tales and folkloric rituals, re-framing them within feminist, queer, anti-colonial and anti-capitalist perspectives, the artists reclaim agency for themselves and all those demonised, marginalised and erased from the dominant stories of human history,” Becca Pelly-Fry explains.
Through painting, sculpture, installation, textile, drawing, and more, the twelve artists in the collection reflect on femininity, what it means to be a woman today, but more especially, how to connect with it in a more spiritual way. For centuries, all things ‘female’ have been suppressed, oppressed, erased, and hidden; now, it’s time to explore them again, to reclaim them, to bring them to the spotlight. Mythology and folklore are pillars on which many of these artworks stand.
Storytelling plays a pivotal role in our lives (myths and legends have remained the same, they’ve just evolved and changed characters), which is why it’s important that artists create new narratives that break the heteropatriarchal mould. Artists including Claire Morgan, Qing Qing, Bea Bonafini, Maddalena Zadra, Nooka Shepherd, Serena Korda or Zayn Qahtani use their means of expression to propose a new world.
The exhibition La Mariposa is on view until the 15th of March at Soho Revue, 14 Greek St, Soho, W1D 4DP, London.