REVIEW Mar 2025 ‘Medusa’ + ‘Persephone & Friends’ at Union, London

Jo Manby

Manchester-based artist-curator Mike Chavez-Dawson curates two exhibitions at Union Gallery, London: ‘Medusa’ and ‘Persephone & Friends’, reviewed here by the Fourdrinier Editor Jo Manby and on show for free until 22 March. Union was founded in 2003 by Jari Lager, the director, who previously gave Chavez-Dawson his first London show in 2001. Since then the gallery has been committed to presenting the works of young emerging practitioners. The gallery’s broad programme of exhibitions has brought interesting and regionally diverse young artists to the UK, many for the first time. Chavez-Dawson has exhibited at Union himself and is in talks about several other future shows and projects. Based at Rogue Artists’ Studios in Manchester, Chavez-Dawson has a range of collaborative and co-curatorial projects to his name and brings other Rogue artists here to Union in ‘Medusa’, as well as brokering a debut solo show for Rogue’s Evita Ziemele in ‘Persephone & Friends’.

In Union Gallery’s two small-but-perfect spaces, one street facing near a park in Bethnal Green and one in a basement beneath the building’s complex of artist live/work spaces, are two exhibitions initiated by Manchester based Mike Chavez-Dawson. The group show ‘Medusa’ explores contemporary takes on the Ancient Greek myth of the snake haired Gorgon daughter born to Phorcys and Ceto, gods of sea monsters and the dangers of the hidden deep. ‘Persephone & Friends’ is a debut solo show by Latvian artist Evita Ziemele, who is based, like Chavez-Dawson and many of the ‘Medusa’ exhibitors, at Rogue Artists’ Studios in Manchester.

‘Medusa’ features the work of 19 artists (including the collective in triplicate, Brass Art) and presents both two and three dimensional pieces, plus Brass Art’s augmented reality trigger image in Touch AR: Double Mirror (Manchester Argus) (2025). The individual pieces work well in the space and don’t look crowded despite their large number. I asked Chavez-Dawson if it difficult to narrow down the selection of artists for the show. ‘I did originally start off with about thirty artists with numerous works, but this is always my method. Certain works edit themselves, and I knew from the start I wanted intimate but impactful works, that lure you in and disarm you, a bit like Medusa.’

From painterly representations of the archetypal Gorgon’s head in Evita Ziemele’s Not the Romance Medusa was hoping for (2024) and of the veil that must not be lifted in Jude Wainwright’s two-part Dancing Shadows (2024), to the implicit abjection of Ada Bond’s oil painting on cheese Buggered (2024), Ruth Murray’s oil slicked Sausages (2012) and Karen Densham’s ceramic and gold lustre edition Can (2024), the interpretations of Medusa and what she stands for are wide ranging, compelling and idiosyncratic.

Chavez-Dawson described for me the processes and ideas behind the work he made with Rebecca Davy, a collaborator of his based at Rogue. How was For the Love of Medusa, Chicanery in the age of AI… (2024-2025) conceived in relation to the exhibition themes and how does it resonate with the other work in the show? ‘The piece builds out a few collaborations of digitally generated works by myself, the most recent stem from studies I have been exploring with AI and thinking of the “human narrative arc” in that relation. This is one of the connecting factors with Nye Thompson’s work,’ Chavez-Dawson continued, referencing Nye Thompson’s The Seekers >> Words That Remake The World (Silent Edition) (2018-2025). ‘Here Medusa becomes a principle that highlights how our age of technological chicanery is an era in which the monstrous and the marvellous blur into one another with almost alarming ease.’

‘The piece, [For the Love of Medusa…] becomes a recursive act of creation, which was born from the mechanised hand of AI before being painstakingly re-rendered by artist Rebecca Davy, perhaps an attempt to reclaim authorship, to assert a primacy of touch and toil over the instantaneity of digital generation.  And yet, this act of reclamation remains bound to the very technology it seeks to critique. The image, framed in neon yellow, throbs with a paradoxical presence—at once synthetic and organic, inviting the hypnotic fixation we reserve for our handheld devices.’

What I loved about the ‘Medusa’ show is the fact that each work is so distinct from all the others. I liked the oblique references to the Medusa myth in the sculptural works. Karen Densham, for example, presents the opened can of worms: stripped of its outer aluminium shell, a tangle of ceramic and gold lustre tube shapes twist together into a clump of snakes in Can (2024), a visual one liner in an edition of 20 concerning the ramifications that occur when the Gorgon’s veil is lifted. There is a miniature postscript in the form of Cast (2024), a ceramic and gold lustre edition of 100, which mimics the form of a wormcast on coastal sands.

Was it important to include three-dimensional work in the show? ‘I feel our perception requires different visual ebbs and flows,’ explained Chavez-Dawson,  ‘and these neatly echo the draw of our daily experiences of the “hypnotic small flat screens”, to the “3d” fast food grab of convenience snacks and canned soda. I wanted to present a visual journey, and the three-dimensional, for me always embodies a performative tactility.’

Angela Tait contributes Work of Body (2024), a fleshy stoneware ceramic piece bleeding scarlet ribbon, part of a collection of the same name comprising 28 works that combine clay and found objects. Each of the pieces is thrown and glazed by Tait, who then alters its form by manipulating it with parts of her body. By generating glazing that mimics the external or internal flesh of the body, and shapes which resemble body parts (‘folds, creases and cavities which could relate to ears, navels or genitalia’), the artist communicates and explores the experience of inhabiting the female body, subject as it is to shifts and changes. Through her additions of found objects, each piece becomes more intimately embedded in Tait’s day to day experiential life. Of her work for ‘Medusa’, she explains that it was ‘thrown, glazed and, whilst wet, slumped on my legs. It carries the legacy of my flesh in its own fleshiness. It is finished with a red ribbon which alludes to both childhood plaits and sensuality.’ Evaluating the theme of the exhibition, Tait adds: ‘The story of Medusa is one of transformation, a subject which resonates with my current experience of inhabiting my body. It is a tale of beauty and monstrosity. She is a spectre in my peripheral vision. Is there another kind of power in my future and how will I adapt?’ 

London-based New Yorker Jessica Voorsanger’s Star Trek Pucci (2024) utilizes found fabric and curtain rings to produce a material sample that defies categorisation, caught between non-functioning garment and interior design scrappage. Ada Bond also plays with audience expectations in Buggered (2024), an oil painting reminiscent of a Victorian miniature on a piece of cheese where in Metamorphosis style, the woman’s portrait head is fused with a beetle body. Meanwhile, Freddie Robins, cofounder of Blackwater Polytechnic, an exhibiting collective and informal educational establishment based in North Essex, introduces two eccentrically manifested characters, Alice (2016) and Cecil (2014), made from machine knitted wool, flint and reclaimed wooden walking stick; and machine knitted wool, hand knitted mohair, reclaimed wooden knitting needles and wooden stick, respectively.

Chavez-Dawson notes that ‘Professor Freddie Robins's recent art practice embodies a feminist perspective through several key aspects. To quote, "Knitting has long held associations with women, practicality, comfort, and warmth... I use knitting to make non-functional objects. In other words, sculptures." Her work delves into themes of domestic life and the human condition, critically examining the roles traditionally assigned to women.’ (Robins, 2013). Chavez-Dawson continues: ‘Recognizing the strong association of textiles with femininity, Robins addresses the gendered nature of materials and the hierarchy of value in art. She emphasizes: "The reality is that textiles are still so strongly associated with the feminine that whenever a male artist employs the medium, it is viewed as unusual." (Robins, 2018).’

Most of the works are assertive, commanding our attention, but others are quieter and more meditative. Rachael Goodyear’s work epitomizes reflective distance as the young girl pictured holds a bundle of pale blue snakes at arm’s length in Snake Tangle (2024), as if waiting to see what it will do next: clearly perfectly in control but questioning and waiting, patiently. I loved Hilary Jack’s ironic humour in I am a rock (2022), a rock sitting quietly in a corner that has its own volition and can move around (on castors, like a favourite armchair) referencing those turned to stone by the Gorgon’s stare, but also the supportive partners of Medusa types, the rocks in the background.

The works are varied and inspiring, and accessible to all, although some are more arcane in their references to Medusa than others. Sarah Hardacre combines poetic refusal, masked absence and an assertive pose in her collage, Forget Mermaids (abstract) (2010). Sam Owen Hull presents Maquette for a painting 0609 (2024) where manipulated acrylic paintskin might be a substitute for Gorgonesque snakes, and Jane Chavez-Dawson’s Veiled Oracle (2025), an aluminium magnet C-type with matt black stainless panel, assembles attributes of divination and mythical presentiment.

Nye Thompson’s The Seeker >> Words That Remake The World (Silent Edition) (2018-2025), a giclée print on Hahnemühle photo rag paper requires the background information that Thompson created an ‘AI-based software system, a demiurge-like entity, existing within the infrastructure of the Internet. It watched the world through millions of security cameras, analysing and naming the things it saw.’ The software produced thousands of descriptions of objects and concepts that it observed, and Thompson created a monumental drawing, Words That Remake The World, to map these visions topographically. Adjacent to Medusa is the Ancient Egyptian god Ptah-Seker who ‘created the world by speaking the words to describe it’, on which The Seeker >>… is based (https://nyethompson.net/).

Out onto the street again, and in through a different doorway, ‘Persephone & Friends’ is a debut solo exhibition by Manchester-based Latvian artist, Evita Ziemele. Here, Ziemele’s Persephones don’t simply confront the ideal of a perfect ‘classical’ maiden, but literally tear it apart and start again. These oil paintings are visceral, bawdy, defiant – they laugh in the face of misogyny and chauvinism. Ziemele has created four large oil paintings on canvas, in which women are depicted as the diametrical opposite to gentle and pure, and at times represented only by sexual organs. Weaning Off (2024) is redolent of AI generated images in its strangeness but also drenched in a crazed delight in bodily functions. Breasts are often coarse, globular balloons floating free of the body, or on stems jammed into a vase as in the sarcastic watercolour on paper, Bouquet of Tits (2024). Three watercolours in total are complimented by two etchings on paper from 2021, Fight of the Phallic and Metamorphosis.

The myth of Medusa is conflicted and entangled. The name occurs in early religious history before the advent of male gods. Medusa appeared in the Iliad, mentioned as a face carved onto Athena’s breastplate and referred to simply as ‘the gorgon’. The Gorgons were a Berber tribe of Amazonian women from Libya (Libya in antiquity referring generally to North Africa) who would have worn their hair in dreadlocks, hence the interpretation of snakes. Care should be taken when adding layers on top of classical antiquity; its history is a multiple, top heavy construction that has been rewritten and overwritten many times often by majority white cultural commentators whose influence is wide ranging. Ovid came to preexisting myths and changed Medusa and her two sisters into maidens, and in Ovid only Medusa is then transformed into a monster.

In terms of countering the problem of society’s expectations of women, I asked Chavez-Dawson if he felt women had (more or less) agency in today’s sociopolitical sphere, and how artists, of whatever gender, can increase women’s agency and fight their corner. ‘I feel there’s progress, and in my thirty years of practice it has drastically changed, but as always it still requires attention, and yes, the fight needs to continue.’ He cites Sylvia Wynter, a Jamaican writer, dramatist and philosopher who critqiues Western humanism and its racial exclusions, looking at how antiquity has been framed within a white, male intellectual tradition, as well as writers Jacques Lacan and Harry Kurt Victor Mulisch. Finding Evita Ziemele’s work very powerful, and seeing how all the artists selected for ‘Medusa’ totally hold the floor, Chavez-Dawson curated the Medusa and Persephone exhibitions in order to answer just that question, of how artists can empower women and increase their agency.