Gate of Horns: Myths of Resistance, Symbols of Defiance

Curated by Hettie Judah

Carl Freedman Gallery is proud to present ‘Gate of Horns: Myths of Resistance, Symbols of Defiance’, an exhibition curated by Hettie Judah. Featuring works by Ingrid Berthon-Moine, Isis Dove-Edwin, Emma Franks, Alexis Hunter, Tamsin Morse, Helen Sargeant and a tribute to Mary Beth Edelson.

Gate of Horns is a celebration of female defiance, from Lilith to Gisèle Pelicot. This is an exhibition of unruly objects, unstable bodies and stories ripe for retelling. Some are fierce and funny. Some might make you cry. Looking back to feminist foremothers involved in the Goddess Movement (with all the discomfort that inspires), Gate of Horns turns to mythic figures and ritual objects as sources of hope and power in our own time.

Gate of Horns was shaped by the autumn of 2024: the trial, in France, of 51 men accused of raping Gisèle Pelicot while she was drugged and unconscious, and the election, in the US, of a misogynist regime led by a sexual predator. I had been thinking about the goddess movement, a spiritual tendency within second wave feminism. There is much about the goddess movement that inspires discomfort, then and now, but it performed an important role. For women who had been sexually assaulted, abused, judged and belittled, stories of a matriarchal society of goddess worshippers were empowering.

Our cultures are founded not only on the stones of temples, but on the myths we tell – of floods and gardens, demons and warriors. Myths are unstable, always available for retelling. Like the matriarchal tales of the goddess movement, they can offer hope and strength that is otherwise in short supply. Gate of Horns is an exercise in mythic thinking.

The exhibition title comes from Mary Beth Edelson (1933-2021), an artist deeply invested in goddess movement feminism. Gate of Horns/ Fig of Triumph was built for a 1977 exhibition at A.I.R. Gallery in New York. It carried images of women’s hands forming the mano cornuta and the mano in fica, obscene gestures Edelson reclaimed as symbols of feminine power. The portal designated the exhibition a sacred space. Our gateway has been constructed in tribute to Edelson’s.

In the Sanctuary of Athena – goddess of wisdom and war – two artists use imagery of metamorphosis to navigate emotional and physical transformation. Involved in women’s arts organisations in London during the 1970s, Alexis Hunter is best known for feminist works combining photography and text. Painting and drawing remained important to her throughout her career. The ink and wash Hormone (1998) works were made when Hunter was 49. They imagine perimenopause in mythic terms: the female body as a chimera, beset by battling demons.

Helen Sargeant’s Blue Paintings (2024-5) were made following residencies at the Mên-an-Tol, Cornish standing stones believed to influence women’s fertility, and a site of personal significance for the artist. The Blue Paintings reflect on a period of ill health and present the female body as liquid and unstable. In the metamorphoses that emerge across the series, the body takes on attributes of birds and beasts: deer horns, wings, and the clawed feet of an owl, emblem of Athena.

Tucked into LaLi’s Niche is the work of Ingrid Berthon-Moine. LaLi is a warrior, audacious and unabashed in her pursuit of pleasure. Her name derives from the artist’s motto – I Lack it, I Like it – a riposte to the Freudian concept of penis envy. In fleshy watercolours, the body is imagined as an ambiguously gendered site of pleasure and pain, vulnerability and defensiveness. Across the exterior, Berthon-Moine’s painting abstracts the nervous system of the human body.

Beyond is the Chamber of Isis, the Egyptian mother goddess and her namesake Isis Dove-Edwin. Building on the millennia-long West African tradition of terracotta coil pots, her monumental sculptures evoke the roiling inner lives of all-capable matriarchs. These are unruly and unconstrained bodies. Thinking about the diaspora not only of people, but their knowledge, Dove-Edwin looks to the yabba pots made by enslaved women in 18th century Jamaica, honouring their resourcefulness and cultural resistance.

Tamsin Morse revisits familiar stories through an idiosyncratic feminist lens. Two paintings return to the creation myth. In one Adam sculpts the feminine ideal, in the other, he has accepted the apple from Eve and stayed on in Eden to make cider, a choice precipitating the collapse of patriarchal religion. Morse’s paintings are underpinned by tension between freedom and repressive judgement. Here, animals perform the feelings humans seem unable to express.

The show concludes in the Temple of Lilith. A night-demoness whose origins date to Mesopotamia, Lilith entered Jewish mythology as Adam’s first wife, ejected after refusing to lie under him. Lilith leads Emma Franks’s pantheon of female rebels, inspiring an explosive transformation in her painting and a radical process of unlearning and rule breaking. An image of Lilith inscribed into a 1500-year-old incantation bowl appears in Franks’s paintings and ritual objects as the presiding spirit in a body of work asserting feminine power and non-compliance.

– Hettie Judah