Coil and Roar
with Emily O’Brien

If I were to give hysteria a human face, it would be male. But that’s not what the ancients thought. Cultures as wide as the Romano-British and Middle Byzantium made magical amulets bearing a womb as a stylised woman’s face radiating with snakes. Wrought of gold, bronze, silver, lead or copper, they were worn across all social classes. Scholars generally theorise that a protective totem, sometimes accompanied by spells, was needed to ensure a woman’s womb wouldn’t blacken, turn rogue and wander around the body. Some spin-offs on the genre warded against miscarriage or dealt with various problems to do with bleeding, childbirth and other ailments like migraine, fever and difficulty breathing thought to be caused by a demonic, roaming womb – an animal within an animal. Some pendants bear the inscription, “Lord, help the wearer,” while others bore a lock on the womb. The title of this exhibition is drawn from the womb poems often carved into these amulets: “womb black, blackening, as the snake you coil and as a lion you roar” – mantras to smother, subdue and sedate female rage and rebellion.

We no longer honour such magical traditions in present-day Western culture, but images of wombs in token form stored up problems for the future. I’ve seen the ‘you’re hysterical’ look, shot at me from doctors, teachers, journalists, and so I find it hard to think of these amulets as purely historical or past phenomena. They speak to something true of the experience of gender today. “Because of pregnancy and childbirth, women’s health was always precarious and their life expectancy was short until last century,” says one history website contextualising the womb amulets. Today, the World Health Organisation still deplores the exclusion of women – including those who are pregnant, breastfeeding and postmenopausal – in clinical trials, as such exclusive trial designs lead to huge distortions in data, knowledge, research, policy and medical innovation.

Derived from the time of Hippocrates and once considered a physical ailment, the concept of hysterical neurosis moved from neurology to psychiatry in the 19th century, and was deleted from the passages of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders as late as 1980.

The history of medicine abounds with these biases. In the nineteenth century, a new disorder was variously called green sickness, chlorosis or the disease of the virgins. Young unmarried girls were stricken with loss of breath and faintness. It was thought that their trapped menstrual blood was poisoning them. The cure was marriage. Endometriosis, migraines and epilepsy were also once considered hysterical diseases, while morning sickness and labour pain were supposedly indicators of ambivalent motherhood. We now know better, goes the modern incantation. Perhaps some people find it embarrassing and dull that we are still talking about women and freedom.

Wandering wombs are a bit like tap-shoes or some other cultural relic that can’t be reclaimed with nostalgia. I can’t exactly see uterine amulets becoming tattoos in the vein of Celtic armbands or evil eyes or a print on a Gorman bomber jacket. But, in dialogue with feminist history, contemporary artists are referencing the idea of the wandering womb and its feral snakes as a way to speak back to the tradition of hysteria, and retelling the representation of women in the process.

It’s said that Victorian-era physicians prescribed masturbation, then called an ‘hysterical paroxysm’, for hysteria – a theory that has gained popularity in books, popular culture and films in the past quarter of a century. Modeled from the line drawings from women’s sex guidebooks, elegantly masturbating hands recur as a cheeky motif in Emily O’Brien’s jewellery works in Coil and Roar. Disembodied like emoji, the quietly subversive hands stud necklaces, earrings and grace chains of pearls, a gem that is also one of the oldest forms of jewelry. Ancient, ecological and formed by the secretions of molluscs, pearls draw on a deep ocean of cultural references: their shine has lit up the pregnancy portraits of early modern queens, the luxury advertisements of contemporary jewelry companies, the Bible and The Odyssey. Here, they stand as a feminine archetype with a sexual connotation, also punctuating the perimeter of a mask that seems to conjure ideas of the unconscious, concealment and revelation. Sometimes, a sun-shimmered and rose gold brushed copper makes for a fleshy substitute for a skin tone. In Emily’s other works here, serpents – mythological, fearful – unwind across chains in a self-conscious meditation on the lasting power of old cultural stories of women’s shame.

These ancient meanings pile up in Clare Thackway’s works, who has, for this exhibition, mined the archives of the Warburg Institute in London for images of Eve: after the Fall, and represented her in fifty-two watercolour paintings like imprints from the past — shadowy, single-tone images projected onto our present. The process is one of feminist metabolising: directly copying rather than reinterpreting or augmenting. Cropping and reinscribing images as disparate as medieval woodcuts – copies of which may have functioned as early versions of porn, passed hand-to-hand – and engravings to William Blake and the Sistine Chapel, Clare reveals a rich, strange trove of Christian art – which is not what we might imagine. What Clare found was not images representing a transgression, but images that are wholly and surprisingly sexual and transgressive in and of themselves. We see Eve in a repeated schema from iconography, passed through the centuries, reinscribed by Clare as a deposition in femininity: the unstable, cursed, wild woman, writhing, witchy, sensual and at the centre of a secret flesh world. Strong diagonals show Eve in an animalistic nature place. The tree of life conceals multiple vulva shapes as Eve reaches out to provide tempting apples. She whispers softly to a wiley, erotic woman-snake, who appears to be Eve’s mirror. Adam is trimmed almost out of frame or whited out, but for his outstretched hand, ready to accept the apple. History crackles with fevered politics through iconography.

Clare borrows from the West’s inherited canon of images to question received wisdom and point to the freedom that might lie beyond their burden. Here, they flash by like secrets with a storytelling logic. To these classical subjects of painting, Clare now adds antique brass objects: a soap dispenser, a gilded door knocker, and a keyhole allude to Holy cleanliness, nonadmission and permission. The golden snake, an image of terror, shame and forbidden knowledge, can also be a symbol of renewal and transformation by shedding. As the original female story of discovery and banishment, the snake has outlasted its Christian origin, but retains its cultural influence today: paradise can be ruined should a woman reach for too much. There’s a less known reference: that of the bronze serpent raised by Moses in the desert, which heals those who look upon it. In this exhibition, the golden snake appears anew, on a bed. It’s as though the narrative arc bends away from an ancient religious tradition toward a new kind of liberation, agency and knowing. Perhaps Eve is stepping out of paradise.

In my mid-twenties, I saw a film concerning Sigmund Freud and Carl Gustav Jung’s friendship as they birthed the field of psychoanalysis. Female hysteria is one of the unnamed subjects in A Dangerous Method by David Cronenberg, and yet the narrative of therapy and self-development gives way to a much more profound and uncontainable finale: neither Freud nor Jung realise that their new grand theories of the mind are about to be subsumed by the great historical trauma of the world wars – the destruction of empires, the onslaught of mass mechanised warfare, the belated crashing down of the 19th century’s male political power systems. Before the credits roll, we are told that Jung will go on to suffer a prolonged emotional collapse during World War I, while Freud will be driven out of Vienna by the Nazis, to die in London in exile in 1939. What Freud and Jung have come to understand will ultimately lead them nowhere. The dangers of female hysteria and the cures of talking therapy pale in comparison to the ruptures that will lead to the blood of Europe.

Political assassins, perpetrators of home violence, bad bosses, space imperialists, genocidal prime ministers, hardline racist leaders and hypercapitalist presidents tend to be conspicuously male. Patriarchal hysteria is the unchecked, unexamined phenomena of our time.

So: why should we put so much effort into repressing our instincts toward free and open expression, when doing so requires a violent struggle, one which is still long from over?