Find us in the Slip Spaces

Nunhead Cemetery Chapel

A solo exhibition in association with the Feminist Lecture Program and Friends of Nunhead Cemetery.

2024

Exhibition text ~

Find Us in the Slip Spaces presents a series of new works by Ella Yolande, in response to Nunhead Cemetery, its plant histories and the site’s role as a nature reserve. Tangled in thoughts about the vegetal, wildness, seeds and our messy, multi-species bodies, Yolande’s practice is informed by queer ecologies, ideas of resilience, preservation and the more-than-human. This solo exhibition showcases textiles, plant matter, digital print and sound. The works draw on plant histories and symbology, land based folklore and thin spaces. The central space is inhabited by a textile archway embedded with medicinal and symbolic plants, slowly gathered from around the cemetery. Touching on ideas of thin spaces within folklore, the sculpture provides a portal through which to imagine what might lie just on the other side, moving just beneath the surface of our understanding of the perceived world. In The Synthetic Sacred, Lucy Rose Sollitt talks about how ‘thinness points to the sacred and our leaky relationship with what’s at the edge of understanding and rational’. Yolande is interested in finding these slippery spots where the veil between the seen and unseen world becomes thinner and how we might access a sense of the sacred through the vegetal and the hybrid messy ecologies we live within. The vibrant matter of vegetal beings can act as historical agents and storytellers. A series of new images created from 3D scans of plants found around the cemetery, facilitate encounters with some of these organisms, with specific reference to the importance of the linden tree and medicinal plants often overlooked as weeds, such as nettle. These symbol-like forms draw on the history of plants becoming symbols of wealth and status during the Victorian era, as highlighted in the fern fever (Pteridomania) and orchid fever craze. Among these, a scattering of seedbombs lie across the floor, waiting for visitors to pick up and take with them. The space is punctuated by a soundscape made in collaboration with artist Pheobe riley Law, that works with this idea of thinness, rips, tears and the activating of micro-worlds through non-human sound.