My soul is wrought to sing of kinds remodeled to our bodies new and unusual!

Ovid, Metamorphoses.

Analysis reveals that the oceanic crusts are a lot less complicated and youthful than the continental crusts with
some 100 million years separating the oldest oceanic rock from the oldest continental one. The ocean
flooring is younger as a result of it’s continuously destroyed and renewed. Equally, the southern and japanese
shoreline of the British Isles with their sweeping strains are youthful conferences of sea and land, while the
northern and western coasts – characterised by embattled bays and headlands – are the extra historic
shores. Although impressed on the thoughts and the map as a transparent and delineated boundary, the shoreline
itself is in movement, impacted by the ocean and different forces, each pure and artifical. 
  
Zoe William’s movie Tendresse, Tendril, (Worms’ Meat) (2021) was made in Cornwall, on and round
that historic western shoreline of England. The movie is anxious with the liminal areas of shorelines
and rock swimming pools as birthing locations for all times in addition to websites of hazard and demise. Throughout the making of the
movie, Williams was researching the work of the Cornish artist Ithell Colquhoun, utilizing her curiosity in
Occultism, Surrealism and the erotic to attract out the histories of magic and new age practices that
characterise the distinctive tradition of the Cornish peninsula. Tendresse, Tendril, (Worms’Meat) shares
Colquhoun’s curiosity in setting up rhythmic sequences from pure kinds and dismembered
quotidian objects to supply ritualistic significance. Nevertheless, William’s work departs from
Colquhoun’s by means of her curiosity in additional indecorous kinds. Williams deploys the grotesque, camp, and
absurd humour to discover the methods wherein the profane human system of trade has taken on a
legendary high quality in our world. Just like the Italian artist Carol Rama, she explores the symbolic efficiency of
feminine sexuality and its inseparability from aggression, even violence. This violence in Rama’s work as
in Williams’ is mediated by means of a sequence of bawdy, irreverent symbolic fragments. Tongues, footwear,
turds and foxes for Rama; fingers, oysters, vulvas and eels for Williams. 

Williams’ returns recurrently within the movie to the sea-anemones she encountered within the sea round
Cornwall. Referred to as “Snakelocks,” these tender, tentacle-like kinds are resplendent in putrid greens and
purples. The way in which the Snakelocks transfer within the water attracts you towards them, imagining a tender,
undulating contact. But in actuality, the tentacles are toxic and provides a nasty sting. The “Snakelock”
motif attracts on Williams’ curiosity within the snake-haired gorgon Medusa, the pinnacle of which Perseus used
to show the ocean monster Cetus to stone, and the Algol star, which is alleged to symbolize Medusa’s blinking
eye within the cosmos. Algol’s identify is derived from the Arabic Al Ghoul, which means “demon,” “evil spirit,”
or “satan.” The phrase is derived from the identical semantic root as “alcohol.” Williams performs with
intoxication within the work: the acts of wanting, touching and digesting are muddled by jouissance.
Female erotic impulses unsettle the notion of a nurturing mom nature in Tendresse, Tendril,
(Worms’Meat), driving towards consumption and demise as central but unpredictable forces in a doomed
libidinal quest for misplaced plenitude. 

Historic stargazers had been unnerved by Algol due to its rhythmic modifications in brightness. The
ancients thought of Algol to symbolize misfortune, an interpretation nonetheless prevalent in fashionable western
astrology. The epic poet Homer wrote of Algol within the Iliad: “ . . . the Gorgon’s head, a ghastly sight,
deformed and dreadful, and a sight of woe.” Williams’ work recuperates the dreadful fragments of
mythic and actual our bodies by means of the distinctive modernity of camp, embracing the unnatural, the
synthetic and the exaggerated to create new significance. By doing this, Williams gives us a playful,
non-public imaginative and prescient animated by the transformation of the world round her by means of creativeness. We see
shards of nature and tradition, of sexuality, of affection and ache, registered, dissolved, and internally
reconstituted in such a approach as to offer them idiosyncratic meanings. Via her work we glimpse
our personal interior lives, organised as they’re by means of symbols and narratives that had been as soon as a part of a
beforehand present entire.

—Freya Area-Donovan

at Ciaccia Levi, Milan
till June 1, 2024