In the 1980s geophysicists became aware of two mysterious areas buried very deep in the Earth towards its core. One is sited beneath the Pacific Ocean, the other beneath Africa and each has a composition that is very different from the surrounding mantle, the layer that lies between Earth’s core and it’s surface. The two areas were hotter and denser and contained unusually high amounts of iron. Each area spread out for thousands of kilometres, the size of continents.
What these areas might be remained a mystery until 2023 when a team of scientists proposed a theory that is getting widespread acceptance. They argued that the layers were the leftover remnants of a planet that had crashed into a very young Earth. Experiments suggested that the composition of these strange embedded fields were the same as that of the Moon and the scientists suggested that the collision resulted in parts of that planet being embedded deep in the Earth and part forming the Moon.
The scientists called this lost planet Theia, after one of the twelve Titans of Greek mythology. Theia was the daughter of the Earth Goddess Gaia and the mother of Helios (the Sun), Selene (the Moon) and Eos (the Dawn) and was the goddess of light and vision. Yet few ancient sources mention Theia; like the planet she gave her name to, she is something of a buried figure. After the scientists had named the buried planet Theia, another team of scientists later hypothesised that through colliding into Earth, Theia brought water to the previously rocky planet, allowing life to eventually develop.
Theia then; a Greek goddess who is little mentioned outside the writings of Pindar and Hesiod. And a hypothesis of part of a lost planet buried deep beneath our feet. A giver of water, and by extension life, but hidden deep near the Earth’s core. Theia also lends her name to this exhibition of four artists; Rafaela de Ascanio, Alicia Reyes McNamara, Noga Shatz and Amy Steel. Each makes works where femme or female figures emerge from their surroundings of land, earth and backgrounds to hover uncertainly on the surface of things before perhaps disappearing again. Their presences are precarious but affirmative, suggestive of an alternative order to things. They are presences that are always there but which have been pushed beneath the surface, to lie in wait until the moment is right to emerge.
The sculptural work of Rafaela de Ascanio is filled with historical and mythological tropes. As if emerging from some primeval moment, female figures emerge and take form. Other sculptures feature animals and objects associated with folklore and pagan practices. And another grouping invokes Roman funerary practices. Ascanio’s works might be
understood as votive objects that have been rescued from an unhinged archaeological dig that has produced remnants of a primeval civilisation filled with queer wonder and wild symbolism.
Alicia Reyes McNamara draws on their dual Mexican-Irish cultural heritage to make works that articulate non-binary identities through reference to myth and folklore. Reyes McNamara works revels in referencing goddesses and mythological figures and motifs that have been forgotten or erased by colonising powers. McNamara’s practice can be understood as deliberately queering folklore and rituals in order to re-centre femme figures and present them as independent, self-possessed beings who refuse to stay fixed or in neat categories.
Noga Shatz’s paintings and works on paper bring together self-portraits, female figures rescued from canonical art history, witches and motifs that for her have been buried or repressed. Her works look deliberately naive and improvisational, foregrounding a sense of contingency. Figures float unmoored form their surroundings, casting furtive looks at each other. The recurring figure of the witch plays a central role. Those figures, women repressed and persecuted for being women, joyously return in Shatz’s work to offer a different way of being in the world, that rejects cold rationality for something more connected with the universe around us.
Otherworldly narratives also fill Amy Steel’s paintings, which circle around the processes of becoming and transformation. Steel explores how a feminist subjectivity can change our perception of the world and through this process create spaces that are suffused with desire. In these works identity is fluid, with the protagonists melding with their surroundings and surprisingly mirroring the flamingos which also populate the canvases. Within that reflection between the female figure and the flamingo lies the question of how our relationship to the other can be generous and momentarily at least, joyous.
‘Theia’ is an unearthing of what has been buried and that which lies unnoticed. And through that unearthing, there is a celebration of a different order of things that brings water, life and radical difference.
