Sibylline Stories - Liz Collini and Lindsay Simons

Tuesday 22nd July - 3rd August, The Setting gallery and Plot café, Tuesday to Saturday 10am - 4pm, Sunday 10am - 3pm

An exhibition of selected works from a collaboration started nearly five years ago between the painter Lindsay Simons and the text and language artist Liz Collini.

The artists, who share a studio in London, found they had both been powerfully moved by Michaelangelo’s monumental frescoes of sibyls in the Sistine Chapel, female figures with great strength and presence. From this shared fascination grew a desire to reframe within a contemporary context the mystical ancient sibyls, influential prophetesses who wrote their predictions as riddles.

Lindsay Simons’ rich and layered paintings explore portraiture, both of herself and of friends and family, and the great cycles of life and death, subtly subverting and disrupting images with the stuff of domestic life such as tablecloths, doilies and tumble dryer felt. Her works reference the traditions of art history and sibylline portraiture.

For her language-based interpretations, Liz Collini explores the idea of the sibyl’s ‘voice’, drawing parallels with influential female scientists of the modern age and revealing unexpected poetry within scientific writing. Works shown at Three Storeys include some inspired by Marie Curie’s Nobel Prize Speech. Both artists have also made works investigating the origins of sibylline myths in Virgil’s Aeneid and Ovid’s Metamorphoses.

Central to the project are four diptychs which pair a portrait of a contemporary woman with a painted text piece. Each subject was interviewed at length whilst sitting for preliminary sketches and photographs. Taken together, the text and portrait aim to get to the heart of what the sitter has expressed about ideas of self, their agency and influence in the world and their hopes and fears for the future. The sitters include the writer, curator and critic Ruth Millington (author of ‘MUSE’) and Karen Whiteread, founder of Pram Depot, one of the first baby banks in the country which collect donated baby items and regift them to families in need.

The artists will include within the exhibition a ‘working wall’ of sketches and drafts which reveal some of the research and experimentation behind the finished pieces. Liz and Lindsay expect to continue the project; a new portrait and text diptych is being planned with an eminent contemporary scientist.

Liz Collini graduated with an MA in Printmaking from the Royal College of Art in 2007, since when she has shown widely in the UK and abroad. Works are held by the V&A and the British Museum. A full CV can be found at www.lizcollini.com. (@lizcollini)

Linsday Simons graduated with an MA from Birmingham Institute in 1997. She has exhibited in London, Paris and the USA. A self-portrait was purchased by the Ruth Bourchard Collection in 2011. www.lindsay.simons.wixsite.com.artist @lindsay.simons.artist