Katherine Sherwood
Hortus Conclusus
September 7th - October 26th, 2024
Opening Reception: Saturday, September 7th, 5-8pm
Walter Maciel Gallery
2642 S. La Cienega Blvd., Los Angeles, CA, 90034
Gallery Hours: Tuesday - Saturday, 11am - 6pm
Katherine Sherwood, Madonna of Humility (After Stefano da Verona), 2024. Acrylic and digital print on found cotton duck, 101W x 111H inches
Hortus Conclusus - Cripping Madonna in the Enclosed Garden
Hortus Conclusus, meaning “Enclosed Garden,” is an exhibition of paintings from Katherine Sherwood’s Pandemic Madonnas and Brain Flowers series. She crips imagery from art historical sources, including Late Medieval madonna and child and Northern Renaissance vanitas still lives, depicting proud and resilient people with disabilities. Painted on the reverse side of antiquated, colonial-era classroom maps, Sherwood substitutes the holy figures’ faces with digitally-collaged MRIs of her own brain, creating an uncanny dialogue between past and present:
“Madonna images were a key subject of the Aggressive Women and Female Martyrs paintings I’d made in my punk days of the late 1970s. Wanting to address the shared reality of COVID in my work, I used them as a ground for disrupting the classic Christian narrative by depicting them as beautiful and revered disabled figures with protective masks and prostheses. A friend commented that they were scary. I was delighted because the pandemic is scary.”
– Katherine Sherwood, Garden of the Yelling Clinic (catalog), 2022
Fear and misunderstanding of people with disabilities–whose bodies may be different or who might think or communicate differently–has led to horrific discrimination and suffering. Many of Sherwood’s favorite artists with disabilities use horror in their work; notably including Francisco Goya’s Black Paintings of monsters and violence created at the end of his life, when he was deaf.
But Sherwood doesn’t see her paintings as an expression of fear. When she first saw MRI images of her own brain, it was in the context of recovering from a massive cerebral hemorrhage. After the stress and uncertainty of awaiting diagnostic imaging, it was revealed that she did not need major surgery–an enormous relief. She describes thinking they were beautiful, like Song Dynasty ink wash paintings. To her, they were symbols of hope and healing.
Katherine Sherwood, Plenty of Angels (After Fra Angelico), 2023. Acrylic and digital print on found cotton duck, 47W x 68H inches.
As a disability rights activist and feminist, Sherwood has a complicated relationship with Hortus Conclusus imagery. She is drawn to the gilded, sumptuously painted Late Medieval depictions of the Virgin Mary enthroned in a walled garden (or could she be locked in?). The phase is taken from the Vulgate Bible’s Song of Solomon 4:12:
“A garden enclosed is my sister, my spouse;
a garden enclosed, a fountain sealed up.”
Solomon’s erotic poetry was later interpreted allegorically to refer to the mystical marriage between Christ and the Church, a key element of the visually rich ritual that initially drew Sherwood to church iconography as a non-Catholic in a Catholic high school. Sherwood has long looked to Solomon–who was himself disabled–as a healer, incorporating his magical seals into her paintings. But Solomon was said to have had over 700 wives, so maybe he should cool it with the “sealed fountain” talk.
The patriarchy’s obsession with walled gardens and chastity has led to the ongoing violent regulation of women’s bodies and their physical and spiritual confinement. So perhaps the MRIs are the masks that women wear to conform to the roles imposed on them. But MRIs reveal as much as they conceal, seeing through the skull’s enclosure to see the brain, to access our interior selves.
Sherwood’s work subverts the dispassionate medical gaze with spiritual passion and confronts the historical exclusion and abuse of people with disabilities with faith in our ability to heal ourselves and create an inclusive society. Her paintings bring hidden histories to light, counter ableist representations, and reclaim space for disabled bodies in idealized depictions of beauty and salvation.