We Grew the Long Bones

An exhibition curated by Oliver Projects in September 2020 at the galleries of Eton College (historic boys boarding college in Windsor, UK), following an artist’s residency, We Grew The Long Bones brought together a group of images reflecting nuanced female folkloric characters, as well as ideas of sanctuary and threat.

The project is rooted in research of female archetypes from folklore and myth such as Baba Yaga the witch, who often features in Slavic folk tales. Baba Yaga lives in a house with chicken legs. Like so many literary ‘witches’ she is a highly nuanced character, she can appear at once cruel, benevolent, logical and fair. This and various other visual metaphors, including a fragile, protective tent structure, and the magician's trick of the sawn in half woman, combine to reflect the increasingly fragmented way in which work and personal life is sub-divided to fit an often unrealistic ideal.

In the large collagraph Folding Inside Out, the tent / house structure dominating the foreground is divided, split almost exactly down the middle of the image itself. A woman’s outline is both broken and breaking through the structure and cloudy sky overhead. Chicken fathers, divisions in the picture plane, fragile, protective structures and the trappings of domesticity recur throughout this body of work. 

Katherine Jones, RA.

We Grew the Long Bones, portfolio of 10 collagraphs with hand colouring, ed. 25, image: 24 cm x 18 cm, paper: 40 cm x 33 cm