Threshing / Holding

Once there was a body of two sexes and one whole. Once there was a god who saw both the future and past, guardian of a threshold we must pass through.

Threshing/Holding is a two woman show of work by Theodora Cleary and Nat Ophelia Walpole. Born out of an ongoing dialogue between the artists, the exhibition highlights the similarities and differences in how they explore and express trans femininity and trans womanhood within their respective practices.

Pulled together by a shared interest in mythopoetic visual storytelling, magic(k), and queer figuration. Threshing/Holding brings their oeuvres into conversation, placing Walpole’s surreal autosymbolist figurative paintings, transfeminist research, and poetry alongside Cleary’s dream-like ornamented works on paper, fabric, and sound. Inviting you into a deeply personal and aesthetically rich inner world alive with strange delights and beautiful terrors.

The exhibition began with a reimagining of Janus – the two-faced Roman god and guardian of thresholds, beginnings, endings, and borders. Here the traditionally masculine god becomes an androgyne, the dual-sexed amalgam of masculinity and femininity with origins in Ancient Greek myth – an ode to this ideas role in the 19th Century Decadent movement, its many permutations in queer visual culture, and what it can mean for trans people today.

As Janus becomes an archetypically trans deity, her presence manifests under new names within the entities, characters, and motifs of both artist’s visual universe; encompassing transition as a social, personal, medical, and political act.

Threshing/Holding asks if these many manifestations guard the gateways of social and medical transition or welcome us joyfully through them.

Join us for an opening, Friday 11th July, 6-9pm.