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.
