Jane Hayes Greenwood
A Little History
23 June - 29 July 2023



Images / Press Release

A Little History presents two series of paintings alongside a number of new ceramic pieces. The works explore the complex and widely felt relationship between birth and death, and draw on the artist's recent experiences of motherhood and mourning. Not long after the arrival of her children in 2020 and 2021, Hayes Greenwood experienced a significant family bereavement. The objects and paintings in this exhibition were developed out of transformational moments of profound joy and devastating loss and speak more broadly about the little histories we each create.

In an attempt to make sense of her recent experiences, Hayes Greenwood began creating a series of clay objects. These intuitive, hand-made things later became the subjects for many of the paintings in the exhibition. The works feature anthropomorphic vessels, receptacles that are simultaneously bodies, containers and artefacts, set in hallucinatory, melancholic and virtual environments.

The Land of Plenty (2023), one of the largest paintings in the show, features a part-woman, part-vessel heavily laden with fourteen breasts and holding flowers and plants that appear at various points in their life cycle. The piece references a 16th century fountain in the gardens of the Villa d'Este near Rome that depicts Diana of Ephesus, a multi-breasted goddess of fertility who spouts water from her many nipples. The Land of Plenty touches on the politics of care and questions what the limits of our emotional capacity might be. 

The smaller-scale works featuring plants are an expansion of Hayes Greenwood's, The Witch's Garden project, a series of over 40 paintings which she began working on in 2019. Here, the botanical imagery makes use of a rich symbolism that is both personal to the artist as well as having a wider metaphorical resonance. Snowdrops appear in multiple paintings; they are often the first flowers to appear in the new year and are often associated with beginnings and the ability to push through and overcome challenges. These small, delicate flowers that hang their heads as if weeping were on the ground when Hayes Greenwood lost her stepfather. For her, the flowers became synonymous with the intensity of grief as well as becoming symbols of hope and rebirth. 

The works in this show reflect on the life cycles that affect us all and remind us that life's beauty is inseparable from its fragility.

A Little History

by Tess Charnley

'A Little History' tracks a significant period in Jane Hayes Greenwood's life. Emerging from three years of seismic change for the artist, the exhibition explores the coalescence of bereavement, birth, life and death. Comprising two series of paintings and a body of sculptural pieces, the works follow the birth of Hayes Greenwood's two children and the death of her stepfather, examining how loss and gain can co-exist and offering routes through the whiteout of grief.

The exhibition begins with an extension of 'The Witch's Garden' series, an ongoing project that grew out of the artist's extensive research into herbalism, botanical drawings and the symbolism of plants and flowers. Here, the emphasis shifts from the medicinal properties of plants to their anthropomorphic qualities, with Hayes Greenwood interested in the performative nature of flowers. Each small painting depicts a different plant or flower against a psychedelic background. Primula Auriculas shine their stamen's towards the viewer; a mayapple erupts from grey earth and a snowdrop grows out of the unlikeliest of places, a swelling pool of water, its reflection mirrored like a floral Narcissus occupied by the self it never sees. In this painting, 'The Darkest Night', the flower bends in a mourning posture and a single drop of water falls towards the pool, a collection of its own tears.

Each flower in the exhibition holds a significance for Hayes Greenwood. The Primula Auriculas imprinted themselves onto her mind during a trip to a garden centre shortly after her stepfather's death, their clown-like faces emerging in high relief and piercing through grief's white noise. Snowdrops push through snow's blanket with a resilience belying their size and delicacy; mayapples unfurl themselves like newborns uncurling their bodies after months in the womb; and red tulips, vulvic and bodily, present themselves neatly like strangers in their initial bunch and then wind themselves in different directions in the days afterwards, performing their feelings like children. Some references are more ephemeral, the bluebells holding a simultaneous power and fragility even when separated from the magic of their carpeted woods.

This anthropomorphism of the flowers continues across the works, with the painting 'Raw Material' bridging the gap between the two series of paintings and the sculptural works. Here, a tulip grows from a fractured vessel. Torso-like, the vessel is severed down the middle with a clean cut or tear, a breast on either side. There are multiple points of tension in the work, the two sides of the tear yearning to stretch themselves back together, like skin cells fusing, binding and growing anew after trauma. The work recalls both the severance of grief and our capacity for rupture, the visceral nature of our experience uncontainable. Not unlike the Japanese art of Kintsugi, the fragmentation of grief demands psychological work that repairs the fractured self with gold, transforming the person into something similar on the outside but fundamentally changed. Simultaneously, the tulip pushes upwards from within the vessel, burdened by the weight of its own flower and reminding us that grief can be fertile ground for growth.

Ceramic objects are displayed in a vitrine separating the 'Witch's Garden' works from the series of totemic, psychadelic paintings in the second room, simultaneously informing the paintings and imbibing them with a fragility. Hayes Greenwood describes the process of making these sculptures as an instinctive way of 'making sense' of her recent experiences and it is easy to understand why. So often we return to our hands with grief, the last part we hold of the person we have lost. There is an aliveness in the physicality of clay, smooth, wet, and tactile with its earthy smell, that provides an antidote to absence. Its malleability, so susceptible to the movement of our hands, returns a semblance of control.

Urn-like vessels pour, collapse and threaten to topple, plasters pasted on their surfaces to reinforce their strength. In 'A Little History (4)' a clay woman bows with the weight of her five breasts, heavy with milk, referencing the fertility goddess Diana of Ephesus. Fractured limbs balance by a woman's head in 'A Little History (2)', her thick strands of Medusa-like hair concealing her implosion. There is a close link between this sculpture and 'The Contortionist' painting, the sculpture an artefact of the painting's subject after its rupture, or the painting a representation of the sculpture's imminent healing. In 'The Contortionist' the woman's body is whole, bending over backwards to hold a vessel growing out of her pelvis upright, filled with a branch and three tulips, lamenting towards the ground. These works probe how our bodies are no longer our own in pregnancy, childbirth and motherhood, hollowed out to hold and serve another. There is no resentment in the works though, rather they are an ode to the fruitfulness of this act of service, the beauty of nurturing new life. The flowers in the vessels flourish but droop here, Hayes Greenwood's nod to the weight of grief.

The palette is luminous throughout the exhibition, oscillating primarily between blues and pinks, representative of life and the bodily and of loss and mourning. The hallucinatory palette of the paintings' backgrounds combines with an undulating framing around the edges of the works to lead the viewer to feel they are tipping into an otherworldly portal. In some paintings the backgrounds are blended smoothly to create an aurora borealis effect and in others Hayes Greenwood drags pigment down the canvas, Richter-esque in its texture. Surrounded by the juxtaposition of the paintings' high-key palette and the solidity of the maternal vessels, the viewer is both transported and held, the paintings' mothering extending beyond the works.

In Maggie Nelson's seminal book 'The Argonauts', the experience of Nelson giving birth to her much longed for baby Iggy and the death of her partner Harry's mother are recounted in parallel. The accounts of these experiences are visceral and bodily, the pushing and reaching in labour adjacent to the drawn out moments of watching a loved one die, willing them away from pain. Hayes Greenwood's 'A Little History' occupies a similar space. In the works we feel the weight of grief meet with the joy and transformation of motherhood, the two experiences holding each other in a suspended balance. As Nelson asks, "But is there such thing as nothing, as nothingness? I don't know. I know we're still here, who knows for how long, ablaze with our care, its ongoing song."