Artist: Elena Njoabuzia Onwochei-Garcia

William Hine presents Grown: The Altering of Innocence and Experience, a solo exhibition by Glasgow-based artist Elena Njoabuzia Onwochei-Garcia. The exhibition coincides with the opening of the sixth edition of London Gallery Weekend.

Central to the exhibition is an installation comprised of large-scale, suspended collages that combine Onwochei-Garcia’s individual works into immersive structures. Layered compositions revolve around allegorical scenes that draw on literature, myth and folklore. Intertwining historical research with fictional references, the artist constructs complex and unstable tableaux in which fables, falsehoods and competing perspectives overlap. New stories and ideas emerge from well-known tales that offer novel ways of understanding personal experience, memory and identity.

Drawing upon William Blake’s illustrated poems, the narrative form of the exhibition is anchored through the dual perspectives of Innocence and Experience. Expanded upon through entangled stories of youth and adulthood, Onwochei-Garcia makes reference to the Homeric Hymn to Demeter as a means of exploring matrilineal relationships. Throughout the large-scale collages are representations rooted in Experience, interspersed with corresponding small-scale casein paintings on marble that offer the perspective of Innocence. Displayed in close correlation, episodic sequences appear in dialogue and in contrast with each other, as moments from the stories of the Greek myth’s three generations of female family members, Rhea, Demeter and Persephone, collide and unfold.