Archive
Alexi Marshall
Under The Pomegranate Moon
13.05.2023 – 11.06.2023
Pomegranates are drenched in heady paradoxes. Juicy, sweet and bitter to the tongue, this fruit is culturally digested as both a symbol of fertility and death. For eons, these crimson vessels have provided symbolic terrain for countless cultures to map out their desires and losses onto. In Ancient Rome, newlywed women wore crowns of pomegranate leaves and the fruit was smashed in bridal chambers. Pomegranates grow in the Garden of Paradise in the Quran, tempting bad behaviour and the Old Testament links its many seeds with God’s commandments. Alexi Marshall’s Under a Pomegranate Moon is awash with these associations, yet Persephone’s entwinement with this jewelled entity surfaces as a key emblem.
In this tale, Hades, Lord of the Underworld, cracks open the surface of the earth and pulls Persephone into his cadaverous realm. Before being rescued, Hades tricks her into sharing six pomegranate seeds with him, contractually binding her to spend six months of the year as his queen, and the other six months with her mother, Demeter, the Goddess of Fertility and the Harvest. The ceaseless phases of joy and pain experienced by Demeter results in the birth of seasons. Persephone’s own agency often gets lost in the traditional narrative, which Marshall firmly reclaims within this series of works.
Marshall frequently processes deeply personal experiences in the shapeshifting arenas of mythology, folklore and fable. This approach paves the way for intimate meditations and wider societal reflections, as the artist seamlessly balances the internal within the external. In this body of work, pomegranates serve as porous guides to examine raw facets of pleasure, pain and rebirth. A host of epicures, goddesses, priests and creatures meet the viewer’s eye, each of them submerged in varying eternal currents. Seasonal patterns, menstrual cycles, death and new life congregate in the gallery space, with each piece crystalising pivotal moments within these sequences.
The works themselves evolve through repetitive, durational processes. Marshall begins with sketching, aiming to capture an image conjured in her mind. She’ll then play with watercolour to get the tonal qualities and palette solidified before beginning the arduous process of lino printing onto large sheets of Japanese paper. With extremely high stakes, the overall image is created through continual pressings in different tones. Ochres, plums, and cerulean blues bleed into one another, conjuring moments of high definition and more murky swathes of muddling colour.
Like a fruit ripening, or a flower blossoming, each ‘lino painting’ comes into being, complete with its own intricacies.
Marshall peppers each work with a plethora of visual registers. Ancient symbols sit alongside highly detailed linework. The fish in Katabasis replicate etchings of fish found within ancient Israeli cave paintings for example, their stark markings intermingling with languid tendrils of hair. Spirals sit amongst clouds of colour in La Pieta, disrupting an easy translation of the work’s visual language. This aesthetic brew cultivated by Marshall opens out potential temporal and cosmological cracks within this body of work, situating the artist’s experiences within an extended continuum of mythology, ecology, sexuality and spirituality.
Classifying the behaviour of memory, Virginia Woolf contends that moments become ‘stabilized, stamped like a coin indelibly among a million that slip by imperceptibly’. * For Marshall, memories are not directly recounted, but particular slices of stories are metamorphized by personal markers. Like wax seals, the blood red fruits in these works cement the artist’s own roots within eternal cycles of love and loss. As both liberator and entrapper, a blessing and a curse, the duality of the pomegranate speaks volumes.
Fran Painter-Fleming