Pi Artworks is thrilled to present The Queens of Aquitaine, a group show curated by Marcelle Joseph featuring the recipients of the 2023 GIRLPOWER Residency, 9-25 November 2023.
Emily Mannion | Emily Moore | Emily Platzer | Becky Tucker
‘When you’re in another environment, you discover your different selves’.
Bringing together the works of Emily Mannion, Emily Moore, Emily Platzer and Becky Tucker, The Queens of Aquitaine presents new work produced at the culmination of these four artists’ stay at the GIRLPOWER Residency in the Aquitaine region of southwestern France.
‘When you’re in another environment, you discover your different selves’.
Bringing together the works of Emily Mannion, Emily Moore, Emily Platzer and Becky Tucker, The Queens of Aquitaine presents new work produced at the culmination of these four artists’ stay at the GIRLPOWER Residency in the Aquitaine region of southwestern France.
The residency is organised and run by the GIRLPOWER Collection, a partnership founded in 2012 by UK-based independent curator and collector Marcelle Joseph and Zurich-based lawyer and
businesswoman Kimberly Morris, to support female-identifying and non-binary contemporary artists through the acquisition of their work at the early stages of their careers. The Residency’s mission is to provide these early-career artists with an opportunity to slow down and centre their focus on their practice, without the stress of deadlines and life in a big city. It invites artists to immerse themselves in the history and culture of the area that dates back to the Knights of Templar, and that was of course home to the legendary medieval Queen Eleanor of Aquitaine (1122 –1204), who was both Queen of France and England during her lifetime.
This exhibition highlights the varied approach to female identity and experience that each of these artists adopt, particularly when offered respite from their native urban environments (London for Mannion and Moore, Paris for Platzer and Glasgow for Tucker). Tucker intensified her research into neo-medievalism while in rural France to produce her Gothic and monstrously inspired ceramics that re-imagine histories and potential futures while mining the art of the Middle Ages. Emily Moore was equally influenced by her surroundings, in particular, a nearby iris farm and local market vendors selling haberdashery items and vintage linens. Expanding further her own coined term of ‘wildness’ in painting, Moore painted, drew and sewed on a myriad of different surfaces from wooden cutting boards to antique burlap bags and linen and lace serviettes. Platzer collected soil samples from the side of the road in her travels in the Aquitaine to make new paint pigments, creating a new body of work
inspired by her recent research into Tarot cards and their relationship to Carl Jung’s theory of archetypes. Over her month in France, Mannion continued her psychological investigation of interior spaces and the objects contained with them, painting objects she came into contact with - from a spear of asparagus that was abundantly in season in May to the on-site swimming pool’s vacuum cleaning robot.
The Queens of Aquitaine sees Marcelle Joseph bring together the complexities of these four artist’s practices in a celebration of their differences, highlighting the nuances in their practices formed during their month of reflection and development while abroad. The GIRLPOWER Residency amplifies creativity let loose, and this exhibition highlights the promise of these women artists following their month of growth in a region filled with alluring nature and medieval history.
Biographies
Emily Mannion (b. 1985, Ireland)
Mannion is an Irish artist based in London. She is a 2022 graduate of the Slade School of Art MFA where she was awarded the Felix Slade Scholarship. She creates narrative vignettes culled from personal memory, art history, literature, music and film. They are elusive, imaginative spaces in which the interiority of the mind is imprinted on domestic surroundings.
Mannion was also awarded the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation Grant (2021). Selected recent exhibitions include: Homebodies, Unit London, London (2023); Look Mum No Hands 1: Painting at the Crossroads, 9 French Place, London (2023); A Kind Of Human Clothing, Liliya Art Gallery, London; Second Expression, The Split Gallery, London; Why Don’t You Dance? ASC Gallery, London; Snakes on a Picture Plane, UK Mexican Arts Society, London (all 2022); and Castle of Crossed Destinies, Galeria Dínamo, Porto, Portugal (2021).
Emily Moore (b. 1983, United Kingdom)
Moore is a British artist based in London who completed her MA in Painting at the Royal College of Art in 2020. She was awarded the Valerie Beston Award in 2020 and had her debut London solo show at Ordovas Gallery in 2021. Recent selected group exhibitions in 2023 include: Rites of Passage, Gagosian, London; and Between Being and Becoming, Lisson Gallery, Shanghai. Other selected group exhibition in London in 2021 and 2020 include: Social Fabric at Fold Gallery, An Infinity of Traces (curated by Ekow Eshun) at Lisson Gallery, Tomorrow: London at White Cube, Grads Now at Saatchi Gallery, Without a Painter at Fitzrovia Gallery, Begin Again at Guts Gallery, Thought Threads at San Mei Gallery, and Snapshot at Hockney Gallery.
Moore's new series of textiles range from an update on the art historical tropes of minimalism to the immediate, transient moment of a flower in bloom. Following on from her recent Black Rose works, embroidered onto largescale swathes of cloth, these more intimate, woven flower portraits made in the southwestern France present a glimpse of beauty as if seen in an instant. Moore has defined her own term ‘wildness’ in contemporary art, which applies both to her own multifaceted practice but also suggests a loosened, expanded state of painting compared to those more rigid, modernist examples of the grid or the striped form.
Emily Platzer (b. 1989, United Kingdom)
Platzer is a British artist based in Paris. She graduated from Falmouth College of Art in Cornwall in 2011 and the Royal College of Art in London in 2019. She is the recipient of the Travers Smith Award (2019), the Ali H. Alkazzi Scholarship at the RCA (2017-2019) and the Saatchi New Sensations (2011). Platzer has since exhibited at Mana Contemporary with Palazzo Monti and had her first solo exhibition with Ione & Mann in London in 2020. Recent selected group exhibitions in London include: Selfhood, Berntson Bhattacharjee (2021) and Here, Ione & Mann, London (2023).
Platzer’s practice is based in painting but also incorporates sculpture and textiles, using gesture to reach a bodily rather than overtly figurative outcome, forming mostly feminine entities that propose nuanced interpretations of female archetypes. She collects and processes natural pigments and uses them alongside chemically synthesised colours and typically completes a painting in one sitting describing her process as experiential.
Becky Tucker (b. 1993, United Kingdom)
Tucker graduated from the Edinburgh College of Art in 2017 and now lives in Glasgow, working from a studio outside the city. Her work was recently featured in a solo show in London at Five Years in 2023. Recent group exhibitions include: Illuminations, Steve Turner Gallery, Los Angeles (2023); Neo-Gothic, OHSH Projects, London (2023); God of War, OHSH Projects, London (2022); Cool, Fresh, Sweet Waters, The Tub Hackney, London (2022); Gambrel, Saltspace Gallery, Glasgow (2022); Destructive Mollusc, Haze Projects, London (2022) and Interior Castles, Hartslane, London (2022). Tucker is currently attending the Sanctuary Slimane Residency in Morocco and is the recipient of the Hope Scott Trust Visual Arts Grant (2022), the VACMA Emerging Artist Bursary (2022), the Malamagei Acquisition Award (2020), and the JOYA: AIR Residency in Almera, Spain
(2018).
Tucker’s ceramic sculptures could be best described as anachronistic artifacts, historically ambiguous due to the diverse source material they draw from. The mutable nature of symbols plays a strong role as she is interested in images that have been used to signify different things in different cultures. This enhances each object’s timelessness and allows for open-ended interpretations.
Marcelle Joseph
Marcelle Joseph is an American-born independent curator and collector based in the United Kingdom. In 2011, Joseph founded Marcelle Joseph Projects, a nomadic curatorial platform that has produced over 45 exhibitions in the UK and the rest of Europe, featuring the work of over 300 international artists. Joseph holds an MA in Art History with Distinction from Birkbeck, University of London with a specialization in feminist art practice. Her curatorial work focuses on gender and the performative construction of identity with an emphasis on material-led artistic practices. Joseph is the executive editor of Korean Art: The Power of Now (Thames & Hudson, 2013). Additionally, Joseph is the Vice Chair of the Board of Trustees of Mimosa House, London. She is also an Ambassador of the Royal Academy Schools, London, and a member of the Advisory Board of Procreate Project, London, and the Selection Panel of PLOP Residency, London. She served as a trustee of Matt's Gallery in
London from 2018-2022 and served on the jury of the 2017-2019 Max Mara Art Prize for Women, in collaboration with the Whitechapel Gallery and Collezione Maramotti, and the Mother Art Prize 2018. She also collects artworks by female-identifying artists under the collecting partnership, GIRLPOWER Collection, as well as more generally as part of the Marcelle Joseph Collection. In 2022, her collection was on public display for the first time in the UK in a travelling exhibition co-curated by Joseph launched at the Rugby Art Gallery & Museum, Rugby. Joseph also co-curated her first museum exhibition in the United States in 2022 at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles titled ‘The Condition of Being Addressable’.
The GIRLPOWER Collection
The GIRLPOWER Collection is a collecting partnership founded in 2012 between Marcelle Joseph and Zurich-based lawyer and businesswoman Kimberly Morris who is currently Chief HR & Services Officer at FIFA. This 50:50 partnership collects exclusively the work of female-identifying artists.
