The artist’s latest exhibition is a monument to madness, nostalgia and rebellious girlhood.
“It’s like an insanity spiral,” Alexandra Metcalf explains about the staircase centrepiece in her latest show at Ginny on Frederick. The antique sculpture curls down from a custom-built hole in the ceiling, serpentine and sinister as it sets the stage for some strange encounter. Are we invited upstairs or anxiously awaiting someone’s descent? “There’s movement. It’s not just an antique fetish of an object in the centre of the room,” Metcalf tells me. “It’s actually going somewhere.” If you look closer, the wooden stairs are punctured with an array of buttons. “They’re the strange droppings of the woman in the attic. I was interested in this character from The Madwoman in the Attic by Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar.” The book examines Victorian literature from a feminist perspective, drawing its title from Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, in which Rochester’s wife is declared insane and locked secretly in an attic by her husband.
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