Sponde’s Garden
31.07.21 - 21.08.21
Anna Hughes
Exhibition open on Saturdays 11-4pm and by appointment
Sponde’s Garden at White Crypt is the first solo exhibition by Anna Hughes in London and features a new body of work including paintings and sculptural installations. The exhibition stems from Sponde’s Garden, a story by the artist about one of Jupiter’s moons. The text offers a reflection upon time, rich in symbolism and evocative of the rituals of life.
Central to the exhibitions are new paintings by Hughes which reflect upon phenomena and the mythologised processes of nature, the cosmos, and psyche. Drawing on mystical connections with the natural world and the seasons, the imagery in the paintings are suggestive of an unconscious drama of the psyche. Set against sunsets, changing skies and dusky landscapes which act as backdrops to images that hover in a foreground, playing out like a projected image of the mind’s eye, a memory, mirage, or apparition, fleeting, set into motion and about to magically disappear.
The architecture, history and character of the space play their own role within the associative elements explored in the exhibition; the overlapping and interconnected urban and natural histories, magical and cosmic symbolism, and the collective unconscious and esoteric thought, all mix and intermingle within the space of the crypt. Sculptural and formal plays of strength and fragility are explored throughout the exhibition, creating connective relationships between geometric structures, architectural forms and found objects within the chambers of the crypt. Here, contrasted by the structural metal grids, symbolic objects such as shells, plants, stones and husks are grouped and arranged in intricate systems, constellations and alignments, as if to harness and accelerate unseen energies and forces around their sculptural forms. In the installation Sponde’s Garden ceramic vessels scattered across a chequerboard pattern of stone tiles, and punctuating the exhibition, call to mind a spent libational ritual, hinting towards a possible togetherness, a hopefulness for the future, extending an invitation to the bystander to join in the jovial reverie.
In Sponde’s Garden we are invited to reflect upon our inner and outer worlds, and our own mythology. The show acts as a physical manifestation of the interconnectedness of the human psyche with the natural world and becomes a mirror between our inner and outer reality. In astrology, the movements and alignments of celestial bodies are interpreted as having meaning and importance for human and mundane affairs. Contemplating the symbolic meaning of the movement of the heavens allows us to look inward, as such, entering the crypt, and Sponde’s Garden, is also a turning within, an invitation to dive into one’s own constellation of psyche.
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Anna Hughes currently lives and works in London. She graduated with a Post-Graduate Diploma in Fine Art from the Royal Academy Schools in 2016, and a B.A (Hons) degree in Textiles from Goldsmiths College in 2004.
images: Rob Harris