LONDON.- Josh Lilley is presenting something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue, the second solo exhibition by Autumn Wallace (b. 1996, Philadelphia, PA, USA) with the gallery.
Wallace presents a new body of sculpture and painting that reimagines grief through the language of love, ritual, and performance. Taking its title from the familiar wedding rhyme ingrained in superstition and stemming from Victorian folklore, the exhibition fissures the promise of the rhyme inside out. Traditionally a talisman for good fortune, continuity, and hopeful naivety, its sequence of borrowed objects becomes a way of tracing what else we carry forward: inherited loss, remembered gestures, private rituals, and the residues that filtrate us. Wallace inverts the rhyme’s optimism, transforming it into a meditation on the ways grief is inherited, endured, and continually reconstructed.
A text below by the poet Roya Marsh accompanies the exhibition.
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Wallace’s work pushes us into the brief interval before what we know as now is called the past, and something becomes more than just itself. Each character is a collection of what has touched it, every bit of history inherited without request, and the hands that shape each form it takes. Wallace has built a home in this interval. Her work is a continual exchange of meanings, memories, materials, and relationships.
Much like its title, this exhibition holds meaning that has been passed between lives. The old never ends; it becomes the building blocks for the new. These borrowed histories and inheritances are never only and entirely ours.
Wallace’s practice creates a legacy assembled from multiple origins. All sourced materials become active collaborators rather than passive excess. Some pieces are begging to be touched and surrounded. Others are dying to be consumed. We exceed the simplicity of binaries and dive into the instability of perception and intimacy.
Her characters carry evidence of the key components of survival: tender care, dependency, labors of love or obligation, danger, abandonment, and violence. The materials show up having already lived a life, and their imperfections are invited to remain visible: surfaces hold creases, skins are left to sag, or are stretched and sewn over. They bear all of their selves in this new form. The end of one object is the beginning for another.
Life becomes leather.
A past purpose refuses to disappear and instead amasses new meanings, new understandings, and new history. Wallace’s sculptures allow the familiar to be strange enough to be experienced all over again. An act of carrying. In Something to Be Said for Silence, we see the character Brer Bear embody the dual battles of addiction and depression. A figure steps in as caretaker to the lonely loved one who sits, sulking in the consequences of their own decisions. Is it an obligation or an act of love? The responsibility fits the shoulders of its inhabitants because it was shaped just for them.
A moment becomes a memory. A memory becomes a signal.
The signal becomes an entity, a canvas, some paint, some gems, a story. Something new to be touched, shaped into a flower, a snake, a god. This constant becoming follows you throughout the exhibition. There are no singular identities or fixed categories. The relationship between the old life and the new life unfolds as the works move between body and landscape, ornament and wound, inheritance and invention, protection and captivity. A body becomes a blooming garden.
We carry the dead with us, remade in every act of memory.
Wallace’s work has an intuitive understanding of how the living are shaped by all that existed before. The materials live on as rituals, objects, bodies, touch. Nothing is flattened into an explanation, instead allowing multiple, ephemeral meanings to inhabit one piece of work. If nothing truly dies, where does intimacy go when we no longer inhabit the same world as our loved ones?
Overlapping worlds. Our lives merely crossing.
We are not offered certainty, but we are begged to come closer. To remain beside what we may not fully understand. Beside your beloved, as they become unknowable. To avoid rushing toward completion and instead stand still inside the transformation. Wallace asks for our sustained closeness. To remain while the art changes forms, changes colors, changes even as the light bounces off the fanged-tooth gems in the cobra’s mouth. The becoming is weightier than perpetuity.
Wallace gives us the opportunity to inhabit the interval where time is always happening and not happening at all. We are suspended in a space where textiles transform into mosaics and back again. Their versatility leaves room for all audiences to witness bodies and beings transform from what we think we know into what only Wallace could imagine into being. They tell the story of fragmented lineage through the mother tongue of inheritance received in shambles; all its parts repurposed. Stitched. Unravelled. Stitched again.
