Any, Body, Home, the current group show of work by female artists at Warrington Museum & Art Gallery, doesn’t make it easy for the visitor. While a significant part of the exhibition is contained within one of the building’s gallery spaces, much of it is not. Dispersed within rooms which make up the museum’s permanent collection, their presence brings new life to the collected dead, entombed in their glass sarcophaguses.

It’s an intriguing stratagem – a treasure hunt which leads the artistic into the ordered vitrines of the Victorian taxonomist, encouraging them to look again at what they might otherwise have dismissed. For the museum-goer, perhaps, the scattered pieces are benign traps, primed to blindside then with the jolt of an unexpected perspective.

Thematically, moreover, this defiance of tradition is of a piece with works which chafe against the conventions of the female place, bound by the limits of hearth and home. Curated by Marie Jones, and including examples of her own work, media and approaches in the exhibition vary along with their comparative elusiveness.

Natalie Baxter’s Housecoat III, for example, hangs precipitously above the drop from one museum room to the floor below. Heroic in its oversized scale, Baxter’s evocation of the mantle which was adopted by post-menopausal working-class woman as late as the 1970s is accessorised with some of the colour and flamboyance of the small-screen heroism of that decade; a housecoat fit for a wrestler on World Of Sport, a costume befitting decades of toil unjustly unsung.

For me, the most immediately engaging works were – ironically – in the most expected of media: paint. Each working primarily with acrylic on canvas, both Katie Tomlinson and Flo Perry use their respective technical accomplishment to different ends.

Tomlinson gravitates towards the allegories of mythology, albeit that they’re bound to earth through the tethers of more quotidian ritual. Ssssssself Care positions Medusa and her serpentine tresses in the precarious care of a hairdresser; the fixtures and furnishings of primping and preening also hair-trigger snares whose hall of mirrors could condemn them to stone. It’s a beautifully-executed one-panel gag that wouldn’t disgrace the cover of an old EC Comic.

Sharing this horror comic aesthetic, Tomlinson’s Let Them Feast is as thematically dense as the paint that clots in the depths of its canvas. What could be read at first glance as a piranha fish pedicure also has something of the crucifixion of a female Christ in the tapering placement of its subject’s feet, so that the consumption of the flesh and the spilling of the blood hints at some darker communion.

Perry’s sphere is that of self-maintenance. The array of products, potent with beguiling promises of transformation or transcendence, in her Self Portrait With Bathroom Clutter function both as analogues to the off-canvas tubes of acrylic by which she has depicted them, and as markers of the additional time burden involved in presenting femininity’s acceptable face. Further emphasising this theme, the angles of her bathroom’s mirrors fracture her image, severing her face from her torso, dividing and objectifying her self.

The image is captured with exacting clarity, one which contrasts with the more forgiving light of her Eilidh In The Bath And Crisp Doing A Poo. Looking outwards, it seems, Perry feels at liberty to view the world in a less critical light.

Eliding the distinction between permanence and transience, science and art, domestication and self-determination, Any, Body, Home may not be easy on the casual visitor, but – all things considered – it’s worth the effort.

By Desmond Bullen, Chief Arts Correspondent

Main image: Painting by Flo Perry. Photo credit Amy Sanderson.

 

Any, Body, Home is at Warrington Museum & Art Gallery until August 31, 2025. For more information, click here.