Artists: Oyrania Vakoulis-Morris - Lisa Ivory

Twilight Contemporary is excited to present Hecate, a group exhibition reimagining the Greek Goddess of magic, boundaries, and the night. Hecate is known for her ability to move freely between the world of the living and that of the dead, and for her power to communicate simultaneously with the past, present, and future. This show invites artists to reimagine the goddess in a contemporary context, setting the gauntlet for an exhibition steeped in magic and mystery.

Words from Honor Cargill-Martin, author, classicist, and art historian, whom will officially open and introduce our next exhibition, Hecate, on Thursday 8th May. Honor is the author of the wonderful bestseller ‘Messalina,' a bold and witty reappraisal of ancient Rome’s most scandalous empress. Her work reclaims the legacy of a much slandered and underestimated female figure of ancient history, making her the perfect voice to launch our exhibition exploring the Greek goddess of magic and mystery.:It is hard, living in a Judeo-Christian world, to understand the degree of ambiguity that clouded the relationship between gods and mortals in ancient Greece. This was a world in which the veil that separated the humans and divine was believed to be much thinner, and in which there was no central text that could be relied upon to provide absolute religious answers.Belief had accrued over millennia, made up of snippets of myth, local ritual, folk tales, and imported ideas dislocated from their original contexts. And it kept accruing into the historical period: moulded by whatever plays, poems, artworks, political anxieties, and urban legends captured the Greek imagination.These whirling traditions meant that every Greek god appeared in numerous forms, some lighter, some darker – but few gods emerge so ambiguous as Hecate. To some she was the ‘nurturer of the young’, protector of children, mothers, baby animals. To others she was a terrible apparition, a goddess of the ghosts who stalked the night with phantom torches and howling hellhounds.More so than for the other gods, Hecate’s multiplicity seems to be central to her power. It is why she is worshipped at crossing places and, perhaps, why Greek witches took her as their patron goddess. Legendary sorceresses like Medea, magical practitioners in Hellenistic Egypt, and the ordinary Greeks who scratched their grievances onto lead curse tablets relied upon her to imbue their magic with power – regardless of whether those spells were light or dark.That same ambiguity that made Hecate so compelling and so powerful in the Ancient Greek imagination makes her a fertile subject for art today. In reimagining Hecate, the artists in this show are not writing over a tradition created by the Greeks – they are continuing it.
Exhibition text: Twilight Contemporary is excited to present Hecate, a group exhibition reimagining the Greek Goddess of magic, boundaries, and the night. Hecate is known for her ability to move freely between the world of the living and that of the dead, and for her power to communicate simultaneously with the past, present, and future. This show invites artists to reimagine the goddess in a contemporary context, setting the gauntlet for an exhibition steeped in magic and mystery.Hecate’s exact origins are a little murky, but it is likely that she predates the Olympian gods and has roots in Thracian traditions. In Hesiod’s Theogony, she is described as a daughter of the Titans Perses and Asteria, making her a Titaness herself, making it rather remarkable that following the Titan-Olympian war, she was given dominion over the earth, sea, and sky.In the ancient stories, Hecate is often the background presence, not because she is unimportant, but because her realm is what is unseen- the fork in the road, the shadow behind a decision, the guide you didn’t know you were following. She is powerful, eerie, and deeply symbolic, always the unseen hand in major transformations. The exhibiting artists, and those throughout history, have represented Hecate with three faces or bodies, each looking in a different direction. This symbolises her realm over the past, present, and future, as well as her role in life’s crossroads. In Greece Hecate is most abundantly seen at roundabouts and on crossroads or boundaries, she is the one called upon when ambiguity, or a moment of decision is required, at that change in direction, or identity shift. Viewing Hecate outside the world of the living and within the gallery space can’t be ignored. Hecate seemingly transforms the exhibition space itself into a crossroad, highlighting the white cubes’ inherent liminality with its minimalism and sense of detachment from the familiar. You will notice that explorations of liminality, of which Hecate is also goddess of, are a shared point of entry for many of the artists here. In Greek tragedies, the epic, Theogony, and Homeric Hymns, night is described as a liminal space, the threshold between days, and worlds. Hecate rules the night because it is the time when the veil between realities is thinnest, it is the time where decisions, dreams, and fears come alive. This notion has inspired artists to symbolise Hecate as torchbearer in the darkness, symbolising power and direction. As you wonder around the exhibition one cannot ignore the shifting material languages used to depict Hecate. In ancient Greek and Roman art she often appears as icon, carved in marble or cast in bronze brass, in materials of permanence. However contemporary depictions tend to move toward the allegorical. You will notice that the artists create fictions and narratives, embedding Hecate as a symbol of power and transformation today. Through painting, sculpture, printmaking, and digital processes, the artists explore Hecate not as relic of the past, but as living, as a symbol pertinent today. Curation and words by Sam Hanson.