“if any should like the World I have made, and be willing to be my Subjects, they may imagine themselves such, and they are such; I mean, in their Minds, Fancies or Imaginations; but if they cannot endure to be subjects, they may create Worlds of their own, and Govern themselves as they please”

Margaret Cavendish, The Description of a New World, Called The Blazing World

Subtile Matter brings together three years of work by Luisa-Maria MacCormack alongside a new body of sculpture and installation. Moving across watercolour, pastel, ceramic, latex and glass, the exhibition brings together an unruly collection of objects, artefacts, bodies and beings, preserved in the form of a speculative collection.

Subtile Matter takes the form of a kind of Wunderkammer. A looming anatomical specimen of an unidentifiable body unfolds across a totemic watercolour; a handmade reliquary contains a fragment of something that might still be alive; votive offerings from a culture that may never have existed sit alongside snapshots of bodies arrested in time, and beings or entities glimpsed through microscopes, spied through a glass darkly. Botanical forms multiply and slip into unstable extra-human anatomies; leaves grow mouths and attempt to speak, nipples proliferate on twisting vines, microscopic plant structures become difficult to tell apart from structures inside your own body. The boundaries between bodies, and between taxa, begin to loosen, allowing space for something stranger to slip through the cracks.

The research behind Subtile Matter also forms the starting point for a new project from The Feminist Lecture Program.

FROM MEDIEVAL MYSTICISM TO POSTHUMAN FEMINISM

Queer Ecologies and More-than-Human Worlds