Sophia Hewson: The Longing – It’s Like Vulcan But Sad
Sophia Hewson's contemporary take on the representation of Jesus, the Virgin Mary and St Teresa of Avila puts a Pop-influenced aesthetic under the durable seriousness of resin, embedding stylistic and attitudinal complications into works that question belief and sincerity and what happens when they are lacking.
Overview
Vulcan is a tiny planet that a French mathematician discovered in the 19th century, but was shortly after discovered to have not actually been discovered as it did not really exist. So what does Sophia Hewson see as being like that, but sad? There are three works in this show: downstairs, a life-sized Neanderthal Christ in a passionate pose and an oversized icon, Help Me Saint Teresa of Avila, are hand-carved from polyurethane and coated in hundreds-and-thousands and varnish. Upstairs, a photoreal Madonna (the Virgin Mary kind) with junk-shop symbolic accoutrements is rendered in oil and resin in a piece called I can feel myself forming (my borrowed rib), But like a slug I am to mighty men.
These works don't come across as specifically religious, despite their subjects and Hewson's evident familiarity with various conventions of religious representation. Nor are they irreverent in any inflammatory sense the reconfiguration of the traditional iconographic elements and media of the composition aren't satirical. Instead, the layering of knowledge and subversion, and the use and representation the mass-manufactured, combine into a contemplative aesthetic in which the 'longing' of the title references unknowability and the means by which it is almost impossible to fully accept or reject this as an element of one's thought.
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