Private View | Thursday 20 February 6-8pm
Pippy Houldsworth Gallery is delighted to present Muta, a sculptural presentation by London-based artist Rosie Gibbens in The Box, the gallery's micro-project space.
Working in performance, video, sculpture and photography, Gibbens explores gender performativity and consumerist culture as it relates to the female form, combining an absurdist humour with abject aesthetics. Gibbens’ sculptures range from the animatronic – armatures that are part exercise machine, part medical device, part sex toy – to fabric-based works that are plush and cartoonish caricatures of body parts. These sculptures are often re-purposed for the artist’s ‘chain reactions’, consequent performances that amplify and critique every-day activities. Her practice examines specific fragments of the Female condition, with references drawn from her own experience of motherhood to Female archetypes found in gothic horror, true crime dramas, canonical Art History and medical journals alike.
Blending genre, Gibbens’s works explore the slippery overlaps between identity, labour and consumer desire as the 21st century body becomes increasingly optimised by technological augmentation. In Muta, a two-part sculptural presentation, Gibbens’ masks are naïve and mechanical, polished steel shells that struggle to contain their fabric innards. They are the artist’s interpretation of retrofuturist sex robots, visually inspired by the villainous android ‘fembots’ from 1976 sci-fi series ‘The Bionic Woman’. Their false eyelashes and puckered lips nod towards advancements in contemporary robotics, namely the alarming rise of hyperrealist AI companions that are “born sexy yesterday”, wired for human pleasure.
Gibbens also looks to the past, interested in early modern studies of anatomy, specifically the Anatomical Venus, first created by Italian sculptor Clemente Susini in 1780. The carved sculpture is a necrophiliac fantasy, a sensual, life-size dead woman whose torso hinges open to reveal her interactive, lift-out organs. In Muta, Gibbens engages with these harrowing diagrammatic traditions in her faux anatomy and playful pull-out eyeball on a cord. Shifting from internal anatomy to external fashion, in her choice of title Gibbens references the round black velvet Muta or Moretta masks worn by Venetian women in the 18th century during rituals of seduction. The shape of her steel masks, as well as the child-like simplicity of their features are reminiscent of the circular cut-outs of the Moretta masks. In comparison to the exposure of the carved cadaver, or the engineered sexuality of the fembot, in the Moretta mask power is gained from the mystery of disguise.
As Gibbens entwines her references, some nostalgic, some shocking, she captures our current fear and desire surrounding AI cyborg companions. She considers outdated ideas around ‘women’s work’, connecting the bigotry of the past to the blindness of the near future as technology continues to assert influence over the female form.
Rosie Gibbens (b.1993, London, UK) lives and works in London, UK. She holds an MA in Fine Art, specialising in Performance and a BA from Central Saint Martins, London. Solo exhibitions and performances include Parabiosis, The Bomb Factory, London (2024); The New Me, Shoreditch Arts Club x Daata, London (2023); Skin of my Teeth, Midlands Arts Centre, Birmingham (2022); and Soft Girls, Zabludowicz Collection, London (2021), amongst others. Her group exhibitions include Arken Museum, Denmark; National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul; National Taiwan museum of Fine Arts, Taiwan; Vestfossen Kunstlaboratorium Norway; Matt's Gallery, London, Somerset House, London; The Lightbox, Woking; Giant, Bournemouth and TJ Boulting, London, amongst others. In 2022 she was the winner of the Ingram Prize, Founders Choice award and a Sarabande Residency funded by the Alexander McQueen Foundation. In 2024 she completed the Hogchester Arts residency, Dorset, and the Good Eye Projects residency, London. In Autumn this year she will be the lead artist for Bow Arts' 'Visions in the Nunnery' programme, London.