In E.T.A. Hoffmann’s quick story “The Sandman” (1817), a gothic story of psychological unraveling, a younger man known as Nathaniel is haunted by visions of a nightmarish character who steals kids’s eyes. Nathaniel, believing the Sandman has murdered his father, turns into unable to tell apart fantasy from actuality, ultimately falling in love with a mechanical doll named Olympia. When he sees Olympia torn aside by her creators, her eyes strewn on the bottom, he has an entire breakdown.
For Anna Perach, an artist whose work explores how myths and different cultural narratives form our concepts about ourselves, studying “The Sandman” felt like rifling by way of a treasure trove of fabric. She was particularly fascinated by Olympia, decoding her as a logo of the often-repressed “monstrous female”—the chaotic and irrational points of the self which have been rigorously managed and denied in patriarchal societies. “Storytelling is my fundamental curiosity,” the Ukraine-born artist informed me throughout a latest go to to her studio at Gasworks in South London, the place she had her first institutional exhibition final 12 months. “I establish as a girl, and I usually work with girls, so the themes and content material I’m drawn to are typically associated to that have.”
Since graduating in 2020 with an MFA from Goldsmiths in London, Perach has speedily constructed a formidable resumé with group and solo exhibits at galleries together with Edel Assanti in London and ADA in Rome. Her research-heavy initiatives have taken on topics such because the Victorian sideshow fixture of “spidora” (half-spider, half-woman) and 18th-century feminine wax cadavers often called “anatomical Venuses.” Perach riffs on these sources, usually by creating most “wearable sculpture”: colourful life-sized figures, heads, and bodily appendages comprised of a textile known as tufted yarn. A number of of those are on view by way of June twenty fourth in “A Leap of Sympathy” at Richard Saltoun in London (the present will later journey to the non-profit East Gallery in Norwich). The sculptures might be displayed statically within the gallery or activated by way of efficiency—an concept that Perach thinks could also be rooted in her transient post-BA research in classical theater and performing.
Initially, Perach was intimidated by how extensively “The Sandman” had already been explored by others, not least Sigmund Freud, who used the story as a key reference in his well-known essay on The Uncanny. Then she got here throughout Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori’s 1970 essay, “The Uncanny Valley,” which describes how we change from empathy to revulsion once we encounter robots that look nearly human, however not fairly. This fascinated Perach, who has lengthy been preoccupied with psychology—she has a diploma in artwork remedy and counselling and nonetheless maintains a therapeutic follow. Her present present’s title is borrowed from thinker Henri Bergson, who argued that it was by way of a leap of instinct or “sympathy,” slightly than empirical data, that we apprehend different folks’s humanity. What’s actuality, anyway?
Central to the exhibition is Olimpia (2025), a piece comprising two matching wearable sculptures: feminine figures in flouncy Rococo-inspired clothes. Tufting, a method which Perach first got here throughout at Goldsmiths, is extra usually utilized in carpet-making than dress-making. However Perach was drawn to it, she mentioned, as a result of it reminded her of the “Soviet-inspired residence,” lined with carpets on the partitions and flooring, the place she grew up. She was additionally within the textile’s associations with feminine-coded domesticity, and the notion of “sweeping issues underneath the rug”—in different phrases, repression.
The paired sculptures may very well be interpreted as representing Nathaniel’s two love pursuits in “The Sandman”: Olympia and Clara, his fiancée since childhood. The latter is introduced as a paragon of Enlightenment-era rationality, cheerfully and unremittingly sane in her continued assurances to Nathaniel that his fears are all in his thoughts. “The dichotomy between rationality and instinct, the thoughts and the physique, is a hyperlink in quite a lot of my work,” Perach mentioned. For the exhibition, she labored with a group of recurring collaborators—together with choreographer Luigo Ambrosio and composer Laima Leyton—to develop a efficiency by which the 2 figures interact in a sort of pas de deux. One of many our bodies is worn by a dwell performer, Maria Sole Montaci, whereas the opposite is animated utilizing robotics.
Spinning additional away from the supply materials, the present additionally includes a collection of haunting watercolor assemblages that reimagine Olympia’s plot, casting her as a pair of twins separated in childhood. Perach described the pictures as “a visualization of the method of repression by which the self is cut up into two components.” (Maybe, then, the 2 tufted figures are each additionally Olympia—the viewer is left to determine.) A collection of tufted heads mounted on wood poles, collectively titled “The Uncanny Valley,” allude to a different monstrous feminine: Baba Yaga, a depraved, child-eating witch from Russian folklore whose house is surrounded by severed heads on sticks.
Simply as creepy is a pair of life-sized ribcages (Ribs 1 and Ribs 2, each 2025) comprised of pale pink glass with darkish pink splotches like dried blood. The sculptures are introduced “nose to nose” in recessed areas on reverse sides of the gallery: the imagined onerous interiors of the gentle, tufted sculptures. As Freud argued, the uncanny is just not all the time simple to outline—however, as Perach’s work proves, you understand it once you see it.
